Serverless with Rust and Protocol Buffers

morristai01@gmail.com (Morris) — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 19:43:00 +0000

I’ve recently been working on rewriting our small service with Rust for fun. One reason is to see if Rust, as a system programming language, is ready for cloud development in 2023. Another reason is that I wonder how much better it is compared to Python or Java in major cloud and data computing.

💡 There is a lot of discussion over which language to use as a serverless service. In my point of view, dynamic languages like Python lack compile-time checks, which can cause more runtime errors than static languages like Rust or Java.
Another reason is that Python and Java need a runtime process (JVM, CPython) to run your actual code, which means they can’t run natively like compiled Rust does. However, I’m not sure about the performance gap. Furthermore, Rust doesn’t require garbage collection, so ideally, a program’s heap size should fluctuate less than a garbage-collected language when running. That means Lambda or Function underlying infrastructure controller should be able to handle invocation or scaling more easily.
In terms of language paradigms, in my opinion, compared to traditional OOP, the modern ML (meta-language) family has a better design for scalable cloud services.

Grpc on 300.Watts

Serverless with Rust and Protocol Buffers