When you switched was it a unanimous decision to write rust? And is this a small team where you all have the same opinion? Or did you have to drag any one along? From what I have seen people who aren't motivated to learn rust struggle. I'm curious how that worked out
There was some convincing, we had to sell why we felt Rust was worth rewriting some of our tools in, and that it was ready for primetime. An initial small group of us spiked and wrote integrations for our logging, tracing, and wrote a Rust compiler for our rpc IDL. After that, we kind of got some shocked reactions as to how we were able to move so quickly and that things actually seemed to 'just work'. We also kept evangelizing, giving internal talks, and just generally pushed the snowball until it gained enough momentum that it became clear that Rust was a win.
No, in fact it's been a selling point in our hiring. Rust seems to jive with a wider audience, it has aspects of FP, C++, and the tooling solves a lot of pain points for more seasoned developers and has energized some of our employees who felt burnt out on pushing our older services forward.
