Kisio Digital is a SaaS company that makes navitia, an open-source REST API providing all the needed tools for traveler information. When the need of rewriting the autocomplete service arose, Rust was chosen. Thus, Mimirsbrunn was the first Rust project of the company.
This talk will present the journey of this rewrite, since the very first POC back in 2014. The different aspects will be exposed without any taboo.
This talk is about how we use Rust in production. No prior knowledge is required.
All aspects will be covered. A few insights:
- How we manage our hierarchy to accept such a new technology.
- How we manage the evolutions of Rust over time.
- How we choose crates.
- What we had to implement that already exists in other languages.
- How we have contributed to the libraries that we need.
- How the different developers and employees reacted to this new technology.
- The learning curve from experienced C++ developers and python/PHP developers.
- Why we have now chosen Rust for new performance critical code.
- Why don't we choose Rust for the other projects.
- The social benefits of using Rust (for recruiting for example).
- etc...
We think that doing this kind of review is really important for Rust adoption. It can help other companies to choose Rust (or not) with a better understanding of the advantages and drawbacks.
Guillaume Pinot is a developer particularly interested in operational research and algorithms. He works at Kisio Digital where he designs and develops navitia, "the open source software to build cool stuff with locomotion". He has been a Rust developer since 2013. His most known Rust project is structopt, a command line parser based on clap and custom derive. He introduced Rust in his company, Kisio Digital, which now uses that language for any new performance critical software.