It’s been about a year since I’ve blogged. A lot of stuff has happened in the mean time. I became a reviewer for the Servo browser engine - especially the python code (which felt good), attended a flight training program at IIT, Kanpur (which was pretty fun), had a war with some of the professors (which has postponed my bachelors degree, meh), and now I’m working for a bioinformatics company, writing production code in Rust (which is cool!).

While I was doing my final year project, I applied for an internship at a bioinformatics company. For the first week or so, it was just python and shell scripts (boring stuff, really), until one day, I ported some of the python code to Rust and gave a demo on that. That was it! From then on, until the end of the internship, and now, my job, is totally on Rust!

All these days, they’ve been using third-party tools for their analysis, connecting them with shell pipes, tinkering the output with a few scripts, and finally bringing it to the front-end. Now, there’s an opportunity (for them) to break their painful dependencies, research on things, write stuff from scratch, while I can get deeper into systems programming, and simultaneously get an actual experience in writing production code (in Rust!). So, it’s a “win-win” situation!

As an example, there’s this Java-powered tool called FastQC which analyzes FASTQ data. With the help of some bioinformatics fellas, it’s pretty easy to reconstruct what the tool does, from its output. By the end of the internship, I was asked to rewrite the tool (ASAP!). They helped me with the spec, and it took me exactly 12 days (~70 hours) to write the Rust version of that tool. 1

The initial version doesn’t have any kind of unsafe code, and I didn’t optimize it very well. It only utilizes the APIs in the standard library for efficient reading, data storage, and parallelization, but it was already ~20% faster than its (carefully crafted) rival, and there’s no limitation for this. Now that we’ve got our own tool, we can have as many features we want! 2

Anyway, I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones using Rust for production in our state (right now), and I’m quite happy about this, because my job allows me to play with the language I love, and I’ve got more than enough learning space here. So, maybe I’ll stay around for a while, and see how far this is gonna take me…

Even though there are languages specifically designed for scientific computing (like Julia, for example), I personally believe Rust has a great future in big data analysis!

  1. I’m planning to blog about it soon. ↩

  2. They were actually impressed by this, and it got me the “game changer” award :P ↩