They are a younger company than these other providers. Microsoft, Google, and AWS had their own growth pains and disasters. Remember when Microsoft deleted all the data (contacts, photos, etc) off all their customers Danger phones by accident and had no backup. Talk about naming their product a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> AWS was the public release of tooling that amazon had been bulding for almost 20 years at that point.
No, even at the onset AWS was an entirely-from-the-ground-up build. The only thing it could even be argued to sit on top of was the extremely crufty VMs and physical loadbalancers from the original Prod at that point, and those things were not doing anybody any favors.
Cloudflare vowed to be extremely transparent since the start of their existence. I'm very happy with the fact they have managed to keep this a core company value under extreme growth. I hope it continues after they reach a stable market cap. It isn't like Google that vowed not to be evil until they got big enough to be susceptible to antitrust regulation and negative incentives related to ad revenue.
It was more of an incident report. The efforts to get back online were mostly around Flexential, so it makes sense to dive in to their failings. That said, it is clear there were major lapses of judgement around the control plane design since they should be able to withstand an earthquake. That they don't have regular disaster recovery testing of the control plane and its dependencies seems crazy. I wonder if it is more that some of those dependencies they hoped to eliminate and replace with in-house technology and hedged their bets on the risk.
Traditional GC isn’t less complex to program then automatic reference counting. Traditional GC has its place in short running extension languages, but in longer running programs you run the same risk of memory leaks as automatic reference counting since you can still over-retain from a poor ownership model. What goes wrong is slightly different, but with automatic reference counting it is easier for the compiler to find and report these issues. I feel you are conflating this with no automatic memory management which would be a higher barrier. Automatic reference counting greatly simplifies inter-op with low-level code and running on specialized hardware vs Python with interop.
RC is GC, but without cleaning up cyclic references. In general, leaking memory is not a security problem (and with a good debugger it is trivial to fix), so I don’t think it is too important a property. Leaking every cyclic reference is a bit more of a problem, but it has solutions like the occasional tracing phase like with a “traditional”, mark’n’sweep GC, but at that point why not just go with them as they are much more performant?
I think the language and runtime are evolving too fast for good support of other platforms outside of NIO based apps running in a Docker container. This should change once Swift has all the features originally planned for it. They are getting close, but there are several areas that need work. The biggest is an ownership system. But there is also variadic generics, extensions to the pattern matching system, c++ bridging, completing some missing concurrency features, SPM features, and lots of optimizations. Cross platform support is mostly for early community building right now. Much of it funded by Apple directly. Maybe around Swift 7 or 8 it will be better suited for other platforms.
Distributed actors don’t actually have compiler support. They use a standalone code generator much like GRPC. The plan is to call the generator automatically during a build process using upcoming SPM plugin support.
EDIT: It looks like there is a plan to remove the SPM plugin and make it a first class feature. This work just started and is going through a normal evolution process.
> Distributed actors don’t actually have compiler support.
I said from the compiler and OS teams -- there are at least two compiler engineers listed on the proposal.
But this is insupportable nonsense anyways: `distributed` is a brand new keyword, there are new rules about how inits work, magic property behavior... I haven't followed the proposal carefully, but there are also new toolchains being generated to enable the feature.
