Rust in production at Figma
<i>> We chose Rust for this rewrite because it combines best-in-class speed with low resource usage while still offering the safety of standard server languages. Low resource usage was particularly important to us because some of the performance issues with the old server were caused by the garbage collector.</i><p>Reading between the lines here, they didn't go with a more mature language like Java because they were worried GC tuning would be a problem?<p>Given all the other issues they noted with using a less mature language like Rust in production, that's a pretty heavy load to take on in exchange for not having to tune GC. Isn't GC tuning a fairly well understood problem? Is there something about encoding large documents that makes it a <i>significantly</i> greater obstacle?<p>Or are there other unstated considerations at play here? For example, I mean this completely earnestly and not cynically, but there is a lot more PR and recruitment value in blogging about a hot new cutting-edge language than "how we rewrote our TypeScript server in Java".