What happened to the tech world throughout 2021?

Author | InfoQ Editorial Board

Organize | Wang Yipeng

If we start with programming languages.

A worrying programming language

On February 8, 2021, the Rust Foundation announced the official establishment of Amazon Cloud Computing, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, and pledged to invest a budget of $1 million over a two-year period for the development, maintenance and promotion of the Rust project. Rust is a systems programming language that combines low levels of control over performance with modern language features, while also focusing on memory security.

Before February 8, Rust attracted the attention of enterprises and developers, and technology giants such as Amazon Cloud Technology, Facebook, Microsoft and Google were frantically recruiting Rust language programmers in the talent market. Chris McKinsey, a microsoft software engineering partner, mentioned that they have also established a dedicated team to support the company's internal Rust project, and worked with the language community to organize instructions, development tools, etc.

So, the establishment of the Rust Foundation is an important signal, as if to say to the team that is in a wait-and-see situation: Come on, gradually replace C++ with Rust.

However, just nine months later, on November 24, the Rust Moderation Team (Mod Team) announced its resignation on GitHub, effective immediately. According to the announcement, the team resigned in protest against the Rust Core team: "They are not supervised and constrained by anyone but themselves." As a result, the Mod team has been unable to implement the Rust Code of Conduct (CoC) according to the community's expectations. The incident was basically confirmed by Rust officials. Currently, Khionu Sybiern and Joshua Gould form the new Rust Moderation Team.

As soon as the news came out, it caused a sensation in the developer community. Since its inception, Rust's cries have been soaring, and it's like being poured with cold water from a hood. Rust has been one of the most beloved languages for developers over the past decade, but community governance is becoming a big problem for Rust, and precedents that have been ruined by communities are not uncommon.

How is Rust actually evolving? What does the future hold for Rust? Programming languages in 2021 have endless stories, and Rust is just one of them.

Compared with programming languages, the 2021 of big data can be described by four words: "wild surge".

Big data of "wild rush"

On September 20, ClickHouse creator Alexey announced on GitHub that they had decided to officially break away from Yandex and form a company: ClickHouse, Inc. Initial members include CTO Alexey Milovidov, co-founder, President of Product and Engineering Yury Lzrailevsky, and CEO Aaron Katz. ClickHouse also received a $50 million Series A round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, with Yandex also participating.

ClickHouse's popularity is extraordinary, foreign Uber, eBay, Cloudflare, Cisco, domestic Alibaba, Tencent, Byte, Ctrip, Youzan, Kuaishou and many other domestic head manufacturers are deeply using ClickHouse technology. This independent operation marks another "tiger" in the big data market.

Not only that, but also the prestigious unicorn Databricks announced a $1.6 billion Series H funding round this year, and the valuation has soared to $38 billion. In other words, just seven months after the last $1 billion Series G round, its valuation has increased by $10 billion.

Since the 1980s, large companies have stored large amounts of structured data in their data warehouses. In recent years, companies like Snowflake and Databricks have offered similar solutions for unstructured data, called data lakes. In Ghodsi's view, combining structured and unstructured data in one place, enabling customers to perform data science and business intelligence work without moving the underlying data, is a key change in the evolution of big data.

On November 2, Databricks posted a statement on its official blog saying that its lake house technology set a new record for the TPC-DS benchmark and highlighted that third-party studies have shown that the actual performance can reach 2.5 times that of Snowflake. In the blog, Databricks claims that this is a big deal that helps prove that data warehouses will either cease to exist in the next decade or will change dramatically, and that "all data warehouses will be included in data lake warehouses in the long run."

But Snowflake apparently had a different opinion. On November 12, Snowflake responded by releasing its own test results, saying that the performance comparison conclusions published by Databricks lacked completeness and that the study itself was flawed. Snowflake's founders also stressed that such benchmarking is meaningless, and publishing database benchmark results in this era "turns normal technical communication into a marketing gimmick without integrity."

Rushing forward is one thing, and the battle for the top spot in the market is another matter.

Full Year 2021 Technical Inventory and 2022 Technology Outlook

There are too many stories in 2021, and behind the stories is the dispute between "emerging technologies" and "mature technologies", and it is also the manifestation of trend changes in various technology fields.

InfoQ Newsroom hopes to connect nearly 50 technical experts to interpret and look forward to 2021 and 2022 of architecture, AI, big data, big front end, cloud computing, databases, middleware, operating systems, open source, programming languages, presenting you with a complete network of dynamic knowledge of key technologies and capturing the pulse of the technology world.

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