I am happy to announce that we have completed the migration from C++ to Rust, and have released a stable version (v1.4.0) that is entirely written in Rust. 🤩
It was not an easy journey. After six weeks of coding, we encountered numerous regressions and changes in behavior. I needed to release two alpha and two beta versions with production testing to clean up the database. Now, it is finally ready!
I previously wrote about my plan to rewrite ReductStore in Rust. I am happy to announce that the migration is now complete. It was a very interesting 6 weeks for me, and I would like to share my experience with you.
I wrote ReductStore in C++20, utilizing coroutines and ranges.
For the HTTP frontend, I used uWebSockets as an HTTP server and its event loop for coroutines.
The storage engine was implemented from scratch.
I used Protobuf as a JSON and binary serializer in both the HTTP frontend and the storage engine. Many of the structures were shared between the two.
I managed dependencies with Conan and used CMake as a build system.
Codebase about 20k lines with unit tests.
I have been developing in C++ and Python for about five years. Mostly, I write services for data acquisition, processing, and storage. I like OOP, design patterns, and my C++ smells Java. However, I avoid using exceptions and follow the RAII approach.
In Rust, I have only written the "Hello, World" example.
I work on the project in my spare time 10-20 hours a week.
Initially, I planned to use the cxx.rs library and rewrite the project in small steps by wrapping Rust code and integrating it into C++.
[SPOILER] I wasn't able to handle this...
Initially, I chose to use C++ for the early editions of ReductStore because of my experience with the language. This allowed me to quickly create a functional time series database for binary data. However, as our platform expanded to include Windows and MacOS, I found myself struggling to manage the C++ infrastructure as the codebase grew. This made it difficult for me to focus on enhancing the product's functionality and unique features, as I had to ensure compatibility across multiple platforms while managing numerous dependencies.