Introduction

Today I want to talk a bit about a personal project I’ve been working on. I alluded to it somewhat in my last post.

As in that post, I did lean on using GPT quite a bit when utilizing the libraries and concepts that were new to me, but that isn’t going to be the primary focus here.

Instead, I wanted to talk about the project itself and what I’m trying to learn from it.

The Backdrop

Rust

I like learning languages and frameworks. I really like Rust and it is my go-to for personal projects. I just really love it.

It makes sense, I came up through Electrical Engineering and begrudgingly learned to write software in C and ASM. From there I learned more and more C++ (I did have a bit of experience before University), followed by the single most damaging thing ever to affect our industry Java.

Then I found Scala. I loved it. It changed the way I thought about software. It introduced this idea of “functional programming” and “immutability” and “concurrency” and “monads” and “typeclasses” and “typelevel programming” and “macros”. There was so much you could do. Maybe too much. That’s probably why nowadays I prefer Kotlin when working in heavily managed environments.

Rust is like the Scala for C++ to me.

Functional Style

After discovering Scala, I learned to not do PLOP (Place Oriented Programming) and to focus less on the hardware and optimization and focus on maintainability, readability, and usefulness of the software itself.

A friend of mine introduced me to a language called “Clojure” and some talks by its creator Rich Hickey.

This got me going down a massive rabbit hole. Functional and immutability have become requirements for me in a language now (barring the ownership semantics Rust offers). I often find myself coding the Clojure way.

The one thing I wish I could agree on with the Clojure community is the dynamic typing. All the benefits of a dynamic system are amazing (and Rich has tons of talks on it, the interactive coding is spectacular), but dynamic typing is not so much. I find myself constantly asking “What is in this thing?”, needing to jump around the code base and running out of breadcrumbs to go home. Types just help consumers of libraries (or other parts of the same code base) not make mistakes, and I feel with type inference the positives far outweigh the “ceremony”.

This particularly bothers me when there are arbitrary levels of nesting. (Is this the map of the list or the list of the lists of maps?).

I just like types so I don’t need to bring a bag of breadcrumbs with me.

Elixir

Elixir is another lesser-known language (though getting popular now) that runs on the BEAM (Erlang VM).

Though this will likely soon change, Elixir is not a statically typed language.

I find myself loving a lot about elixir, but tripping over myself even with some small advent of code problems.

I always go back and forth on how I feel about this. I wonder, “Do real programming problems in real life even have this problem?“.

I also wonder “Is Elixir and all its cushy benefits really all that good? Maybe I should stick to the warm and cozy safety of Rust and its delectable sum-type enums”.

I got tired of mulling it over and decided to just build the same thing twice and compare the experiences and the results.

The Project

I’m building a “matchmaking” service for video games.

Ever wonder how when you’re playing Apex Legends or The Finals (or practically any AAA game nowadays) you join a server, get matched up, and then join the actual game server and play a game?

Me too.

Let’s build that.

Requirements

• It must be “production ready” (logging, tracing, metrics) and deployable to a cloud service, we need to compare the real world developer’s full experience here.
  • I’ll use OpenTelemtry for this and Jaeger locally and Datadog in the cloud
• Non-HTTP protocol (but still built on TCP).
  • I used MessagePack with a size prefix for this
• A test application that can be used to simulate a lot of client connections
• Deployment to a cloud provider using Pulumi

Non-Requirements

• An actual game server allocation, we’re going to use an interface that just pretends to do this.
• A real game
• Not fun stuff

Let’s Go!

Stay tuned for parts 1 through N where I break down the rust implementation, the elixir implementation, discuss their pros and cons, measure their performance, etc.

As of writing the Rust implementation is complete and I’ll write up as much as I can on that first before moving on to the Elixir implementation (which may take a bit since I have little Elixir experience).

Hypothesis

Elixir seems great, I am almost certain the development experience will be simpler than Rust, but I don’t think Rust and Tokio will be as difficult as people make it out to be either.

Elixir will likely perform “worse” (whatever that means) than Rust, but the bottle-neck in a service like this would be the data layer (accessing users and their current skill level from a database) and not the service that sorts them into buckets.

Rust

Pros

• Performance/Cost per vCPU and Memory (likely)
• Type safety
• Author familiarity

Cons

• While Tokio is great, Pin<Future> whatshshamacallit hell is real, and sometimes difficult.
• Requiring locks sometimes around channels (since this isn’t Glommio and per thread) is a bit of a pain.
• Fighting the compiler fixes problems that would come up later, but it’s still a pain.

Elixir

Pros

• Functional
• Tons of stuff is built in from the get-go (no need to pull in a library for messaging/async. That’s all in the BEAM!)
• Distributing later is as easy as pie (no need for Redis or another dependency to share sessions).
• Runtime observability is amazing
• Dynamic (not just typing but a dynamic system)

Cons

• Overhead of a VM (though how big of a deal this really is remains to be seen)
• Dynamic typing and runtime failures because of typos, misunderstandings, etc
• Author unfamiliarity

A note on Pulumi

Pulumi is a new up-and-coming IaC platform that I think is awesome and easier to use than Terroform for me since I already know the languages they support quite well.

It also lets me do some cool stuff like read files etc and use them in my infrastructure code.

Comments Welcome!

Did I miss anything? Do you have any questions? Do you have any suggestions for pros/cons? Tell me I’m wrong, I’m here to learn!

I’ll update the article with any suggestions or questions I get.

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