Java vs.

Rust Comparison
Why Fluvio was built on Rust for blazingly fast and memory-efficient performance and security

This is a comparison between Java and Rust. Java is a popular programming language
used by developers; however, Rust has many advantages when it comes to performance,
and security. With no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical
services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. Latency
stays predictable at high throughputs over P99, which means that 99% of the requests
should be faster than given latency. In other words, only 1% of the requests are allowed to
be slower. Rust is also completely memory safe which separates it from Java with its
strong safety guarantees.

Fluvio is an open-source data streaming platform that aggregates, correlates, and applies
programmable intelligence to data in motion. Powered by Rust, Fluvio provides low-
latency, high-performance programmable streaming on cloud-native architecture. Fluvio is
written in Rust, a programming language designed for code safety and performance. For
instance, a benchmark comparison between Rust and Java on a simple web server
implementation revealed that Rust outperforms Java in many areas:

Performance Test Java Rust Improvement

Latency (Fibonacci) 1,900 ms 57.71 ms ~30x

Memory 1,498 Mb 16.94 Mb ~80x

Idle Memory 162 Mb 0.36 Mb ~450x

CPU Utilization 73% 24% ~3x

Program Size 27 Mb 3.7 Mb ~8x

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• Asynchronous Code to scale out workloads effortlessly

While other data streaming platforms use polling to consume messages, Fluvio uses async
processing for significantly lower latency. Fluvio runs in pods and can collect millions of
events per second with just a few dedicated servers. Our technology can chain servers and
can scale up to virtually any number of concurrent connections.

Security

On December 10th, 2021, an alert by CERT New Zealand that CVE-2021-44228, a remote
code execution flaw in Log4j, was already being exploited in the wild, created havoc across
all industries. Warnings have been issued by several national cybersecurity agencies,
including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the UK's
National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). On December 15th, the Log4j software bug was
said to potentially cause 'incalculable' damage by CNET. All Java applications could be
affected by this CERT.

Rust is memory safe

Rust won’t compile programs that attempt unsafe memory usage. Most memory errors are
discovered when a program is running. Rust’s syntax and language metaphors ensure that
common memory-related problems in other languages—null or dangling pointers, data
races, and so on—never make it into production. The compiler flags those issues and forces
them to be fixed before the program ever runs.

Fluvio is designed with security and privacy in mind. Fluvio producers, consumers, and
other clients must authenticate with a target Cloud cluster and download security
certificates before they are authorized access. The platform uses the certificates with TLS
to encrypt all communication between the clients and the cluster.

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When it comes to Java, this programming language is significantly slower than Rust. Rust
delivers faster startup times and smaller memory footprint on top of it. Java uses Garbage
Collection for memory management, which decreases performance. Nearly 70% of the
vulnerabilities that the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) processes are classified
as memory-safety issues, so eliminating the class of vulnerabilities is critical to better
security.

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