InfoQ: Kotlin to Rust: The Hard Truths of Rewriting a High-Scale Data Plane

Kotlin to Rust: A High-Stakes Rewrite Adventure

Momento’s engineer Ramya Krishnamoorthy faced unpredictable tail latencies on the JVM and decided to rip out their Kotlin-based data plane in favor of Rust. By swapping garbage-collected Kotlin for Rust’s manual memory control and fearless concurrency, the team unlocked rock-solid, low-tail latencies for their serverless caching platform.

Along the way, she grappled with Rust’s steep learning curve, intricate ownership rules, and migration challenges—but the payoff was well worth it. Now you get a behind-the-scenes look at why and how this risky rewrite paid off in spades for high-scale performance.

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