Rustacean Station PubNub with Stephen Blum
Oct 13, 2024
Stephen Blum, CTO and co-founder of PubNub, delves into the exciting transition of PubNub towards Rust integration, highlighting its performance and safety advantages. He shares insights into the challenges of migrating from C, the unique pros and cons of Rust rewrites, and the importance of developer expertise. The conversation also touches on creating engaging resources for developers, such as video tutorials, and humorously discusses the surprising weight of the internet, likening it to that of a strawberry!
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Rust's Introduction to PubNub
- A PubNub engineer introduced Rust and initially, Stephen Blum dismissed it.
- Later, a customer's need for gRPC prompted PubNub to explore and adopt Rust.
Go vs. Rust Rewrite at PubNub
- PubNub attempted rewriting a C service in Go, but it performed terribly despite six months of effort.
- They found Rust handled the task effectively, proving its performance capabilities.
Go vs Rust
- Go and Rust, while sometimes compared, have key differences, including garbage collection.
- Rust's borrow checker, initially challenging, enforces memory safety and improves performance.