HackerTube.dev

Scale By The Bay 2018: Bryan Cantrill, Rust and Other Interesting Things

FunctionalTV · 45.4K views · 2018-12-10 · 37:07

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Bryan Cantrill argues that programming languages and platforms reflect core values, and compares languages through that lens, with Rust as a main example. He draws on his experience with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS.

On Hacker News

Cited again and again as the framework for discussing languages in terms of values, and how organizational values shape software quality.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2021–2024

Topics

Programming language designC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages
Search by tags
bryan cantrillrustplatform valueslanguage designsoftware culture

What people said

freemint · 2022-05 · Strong recommendation

As a huge fan of Julia i got to fully agree. Although i would probably not "no longer recommend Julia" but "give huge caveats when mentioning Julia". Organisations (that includes those who maintain programming language) have values Bryan Cantrill has an excellent talk on this [VIDEO] and i got to agree with the author that correctness (especially correctness under arbitary composability) is not a value that Julia teaches and instills in its users. Some Julia users care about this, some core maintainers do to (as the Pkg3 demonstrates). However there are many invocations (SafeTestSets vs Test) and stumbling blocks. I am aware of no efforts to do formal verification on Julia code. There are no good ways to move certain Run-Time to compile errors. Correctness is not a value of the Julia language. Here is the good thing though, as Bryan demonstrates in his talk, you can hire for values.

Read the original HN comment ↗
codetrotter · 2024-08 · Recommendation

There is sparsely little real “engineering” that goes on in the field of “software engineering”, industry wide, in terms of ensuring that our software is reliable and secure. Performance and development velocity seem to take the driver seat always, in a whole lot of software. See also this talk by Bryan Cantrill, “Scale by the Bay 2018: Rust and Other Interesting Things” [VIDEO] where he talks about software platform values, in the sense of what different programming languages and other things focus on. He also touches on the fact that while higher level layers in the stack might value security it kind of falls apart when the very microcode in our CPUs sacrifices security for performance. This was in a period of time where Spectre [LINK] and Meltdown [LINK] had reared their ugly heads.

Read the original HN comment ↗
jamincan · 2022-01 · Recommendation

Bryan Cantrill has an interesting talk that discusses various languages in terms of their values that you might finding interesting: [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by FunctionalTV, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources