This chapter covers
- Blog posts that are all about rewriting an app in a new (and trendy!) programming language, library, or framework
- Their purpose and audience
- How various authors approached this type of post
- Key elements of successful ”We Rewrote It in X” posts
- Dos and don’ts for your own ”We Rewrote It in X” post
To clarify, X stands for a wildcard to be replaced with a programming language or framework of your choice, not rebranded Twitter. With that important legal disambiguation out of the way, let’s proceed with the pattern description.
“We Rewrote It in X” has long been prevalent in the technical blog space. Lately, it became exceedingly trendy during a wave of Rust rewrites (to the point that a new acronym, RIIR [rewrite it in Rust], was coined). By the time this book is published, we might be in the middle of or long past a rush of “We Rewrote It in Zig” blog posts, or even a language that wasn’t designed at the time of writing.
Aside from language evangelism, articles about porting a project to another language, library, or framework are often juicy with problem statements (why the rewrite was needed in the first place), technical details, and new unexpected problems that arose only after the rewrite was already past the point of no return.
There are a few reasons to write a blog post in this pattern (beyond simply having some “Rewrote It in X” masterpiece associated with your name):