After spending over ten years building payment infrastructure solutions to enable online businesses to unify and scale payments, we were looking for more exciting problems to solve!
We embarked on the journey of building a high-performance payments switch with a vision of making payments more open, fast and affordable to the billions.
The choice of Rust to build the payments switch emerged after years of learning with Java, Python, Haskell, and Purescript. Just a few meetings and not much time spent on experiments.
It was a quick decision out of love and hate :)
We fundamentally believe that software should be built with a minimal resource footprint. The yearning to do more with less !!
Rust offered performance benefits comparable to C/C++ without the need to absorb decades of technical debt. On another note, it also helps us to make the product more affordable for businesses of all sizes.
Our developers hate run-time exceptions. Our application's use thrives on critical data transformations at a large scale, which can make or break payments.
Rust is a statically typed language, packaged with a compiler that can help developers to sleep peacefully at night (without the need to debug run-time exceptions at 2 am in the night). This fact itself won Rust all the votes.
We wanted to make our source code public, and we wish to work with the open-source community to build the product. Rust comes with a large, thriving community of like-minded developers we wish to engage with from day one.
We believe that not only developers but anybody who wants to code should be able to do so. Rust has a steep learning curve, but it has "cargo", which is a savior.
By learning a few macros and syntaxes, product and testing teams can start collaborating closely with developers in a test-driven development. This benefit of more stakeholders involved early in coding leads to fewer bugs and faster development cycles which far outweighs the cost of the steep learning curve.
Our developers like to work close to the metal. They love building solid, lasting frameworks and libraries on a day-to-day basis.
And their natural depth-seeking culture makes them curious about each and every part of the system. Rust being a low-level language with high-level memory safety, was a very convenient tool.
And that was all it took, to choose Rust !!
The payments switch built in Rust is accessible on GitHub. Wish to know more about us and what we do with Rust?