alt Hacker NewsYeah I got one, why? You aren't learning anything, you are just copying code from other codebases and smashing it together to make some nginx-rust thingie... for what actual goal?
Replies
bitwize • today at 6:27 AM
Because C code in production is a ticking time bomb.
jauntywundrkind • today at 12:00 AM
One very strong draw I feel, that's mentioned in this article: Rust's portability, it's ability to be compiled to wasm & run very well anywhere.
Well the biggest goal was to be useful. Nginx serves ~20% of the web, memory unsafe languages might just become untractable for critical exposed to the web infra if the rate of critical CVE's on these rises faster than they can be patched, so a drop in replacement would be a big deal in that world.
But in terms of learning I'm learning relatively little about how to type Rust into an editor but a lot about how to set up agentic loops that can autonomously get tests to pass and improve performance.
For example if you just tell a frontier model (gpt5.5 or Claude Code 4.8) to make some portion of the tests pass they will take forever and just bang their heads against it. I developed a framework to mimic a lot of these tests in nginx... but in minimum non blocking ways so you can run many in parallel with short feedback loops.
Similar for performance - how to make tons of performance benchmark and expose maximum telemetry for agents to go and analyze the hotpaths etc.