Rust & Docker in production @ Coursera
building.coursera.org/blog/2016/07/07/rust-do...Posted Jul 11, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC
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building.coursera.org
I have to appreciate the fact that their post is more nuanced than "REWRITE EVERYTHING IN RUST!!!111"
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Was rewriting to Rust a reason why they dropped the old platform (which, btw, was more ergonomic and faster than the new one), together with hundreds of courses, without providing replacements for them, or even archiving lectures?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11881767
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11882221
A good friend of mine who works at Coursera attributes their descent to the brain drain they've had over the past year.
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They're using containers, so I can't see why they wouldn't be able to run the old courses within them. Also, they're still writing the courses themselves in Scala; Rust is just used to implement the sandboxing environment.
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TL,DR:
"We cannot assume a JVM or Python interpreter is available and vulnerability free ...
Rust has immunity to certain classes of security vulnerabilities thanks to its powerful type system, making it an excellent choice for security critical functions.
In addition it has trivial interop with C libraries and APIs.
Rustup.rs makes it trivial to cross-compile to the ... target triple which statically links the resulting programs.
Rust ecosystem is one of the fastest, and most maintainable ways to build the utilities we needed...
Scala remains our exclusive language for our online serving, but Rust is here to stay powering small but critical components of our programming assignments infrastructure."