Tokio author here (mentioned in blog post). It is really great to see these success stories.
I also think it is great that Discord is using the right tool for the job. It isn't often that you need the performance gains that Rust & Tokio so pick what works best to get the job done and iterate.
> Rust is blazingly fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages.
No offense to Tokio and Rust, I really like Rust, but having someone rewriting their app because of performance limitations in their previous language choice, isn’t really someone picking the right tool for the job necessary.
I’m not so sure they would have done the rewrite if the Go GC was performing better, and the choice of Rust seems primarily based on prior experience at the company writing performance sensitive code rather than delivering business value.
Correct. They wouldn't have considered Rust if the GC was performing better. They also wouldn't have even adopted Go if Elixir was sufficient. This team seems to have an incredible talent pool who is willing to push further for the sake of, as you say, delivering business value. Improving UX, investing in capabilities for growth, are valid business reasons why they're iterating over so many solutions. It's really impressive to see what they're accomplishing.
Right tool for the job should also take into account the experience of the devs you have at your disposal. For an omniscient Dev, is Rust the best tool for the job? Unsure. But for them with already significant rust experience? Sounds like it.
too much focus on "business value" often ends-up with codebase in a state that makes delivery of that business value pretty impossible. Boeing was delivering a lot of business value with MAX ...
I also think it is great that Discord is using the right tool for the job. It isn't often that you need the performance gains that Rust & Tokio so pick what works best to get the job done and iterate.