Lars Bergstrom - Beyond Safety and Speed: How Rust Fuels Team Productivity

Rust Nation UK0 HN recommenders · 2024–2025
18K views · talk · dated · Uploaded 2024-04-03

Lars Bergstrom of Google presents how Rust improves team productivity beyond safety and speed, with data on rewrites, defects and review. It compares Rust teams to those on legacy native languages and Go.

Used as a source for Google's data that Rust matches Go productivity with fewer defects.

Watch on YouTube

3 comments from Hacker News

@echelon2024 · in “Rust needs a web framework”

[VIDEO] > "We have at this point rewritten a large number of systems [..] have some very concrete things that we can say" > "When we've rewritten systems from Go into Rust, we've found that it takes about the same sized team about the same amount time to build it. [...] no loss of productivity when moving from Go to Rust." > "We do see some benefits [...] we see reduced memory usage in the services that we've moved from Go. [...] We see a decreased defect rate over time in those services that have been rewritten in Rust" > "Within two months about a third of the folks were feeling as productive, within four months about 50%." > "People do indeed feel as productive in Rust as they do in their original language. C++, Java, Python, Go." > "One of the biggest latencies is code review time [...] How hard is it to review code in Rust? [...] A little over half said that Rust is easier to review. The most incredible question [...] The confidence that people have in the correctness of the Rust code that they're looking at. [...] 85% of people believe that their Rust code is more likely to be correct."

@ralfj2025 · in “There is no memory safety without thread safety”

See [VIDEO] for a a presentation of Google's study, which found no measurable difference in productivity between teams using Rust vs Go.

@noelwelsh2025 · in “OCaml as my primary language”

I tracked it down: [VIDEO] I don't think it was on-device code, as they talked about porting Python projects. But you can watch the talk to see if I'm misremembering.