Re-writing Firn in rust (pt. 1)

6 Sep 2021 • 2 min read

I'm thinking about re-writing Firn in rust. I'm not sure if I will do it, but I've been thinking about some of the more fundamental design decisions that I want to consider when building software. Firn is built in Clojure, with a touch of Rust for the org-mode parser, and then is all compiled down to a binary using GraalVM's native-image tool. It's working, so why re-write it?

Why Re-write?

The Graalvm system feels like a bit of a house of cards.
Configuring it was a bit confusing, and there hasn't been much documented use yet in the community.
Compilations times were pretty slow and were heavy on resource usage.
Compiling for multiple platforms with GraalVm is possible but I'm not as confident using it; I imagine using rust would be a bit easier.
It would be a good way to learn Rust, which I'd need to do anyway if I was going to make changes to the parser library Orgize.
The parser is already written in rust - it would simplify development workflow and better enable external contributions.
Smaller binary sizes (I imagine more compact binaries would be a result. This isn't important to anybody, but it seems to matter to me).
Using a single language might simplify things, generally.

Why not?

Well, I already spent 250+ hours building firn, according to my time tracking. It was a great experience, but in a sense, I could keep refining what exists rather than do a re-write, which will definitely take time.
Working in Clojure is much faster for me (I would also miss the REPL).
It would take a while and I might get discouraged and give up.
I would have to move my templating system from hiccup to … whatever is available in Rust. This would also mean some major architecture changes - I can't simply follow the system I used with Clojure.

In the end, it sounds like I'm looking for a way to learn Rust, out of my own interest in it, and that's fine. I've got a few other projects on the go that will take precedence, but this has been coming to my mind lately as I've been reading The Rust Book. I'm not sure I have much use for Rust, generally, and I think I work better in interpreted / non-compiled languages but I'd like to round out my skills nonetheless.