Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang

Golang has the most hilarious approach to date formatting

But he doesn't dive deeper! If anything, he's more shallow. This just doesn't read like an honest appraisal of Go's pros and cons to me, he already has his mind set from the beginning (ok, we knew that two years ago already) and is just heaping on invectives: "one really good bit does not a platform make", "Evidently, the Go team didn't want to design a language", "Go is not adequate for production services unless your shop is literally made up of Go experts (Tailscale) or you have infinite money to spend on engineering costs (Google)" etc. etc.

What makes me angry about all this Go-bashing is that it might influence decision makers against moving from things like PHP or Node to Go - which I think would be an improvement, no matter how many flaws Go may or may not have.

Reminder that I'm not part of /any/ Rust teams, not part of the Rust foundation, etc. etc. My site is my space, and it is specifically designed to let me post my point of view without having to bear ( ) the responsibility of speaking for entire communities at once.

It's important for individuals to be able to do that, and it's on everyone else to make the distinction.

The author writes well and makes compelling points. His "I want to get off Mr Golang's Wild Ride" post is good too.

But I don't find myself agreeing with his position, which is "you shouldn't use Go for production services" (he explicitly says this in one of his Go posts, I forget which one and don't have time to look right now).

The better alternative to Go is Rust. Okay, sure, I'm willing to admit that in the examples presented, Rust handles things better. But Rust isn't a panacea. Rust is complicated and hard, and often it's not worth taking on that burden just to theoretically handle cases that rarely occur and even more rarely cause any problem. Programming is a means to an end, and the cost of using Rust (hiring, increased development time) is often not worth it.

The reason Go is successful is because it's easy for companies to use to solve production problems with teams of varying expertise. Its stdlib is well-featured, its ecosystem is good. There's generally one correct way of doing things. The same doesn't appear true in Rust. For example, an _incredibly_ common thing to do in production code is to make a web request. In Go, there is no need for debate, you use the stdlib. In Rust, you have to use a crate, which requires a decision to be made. Even worse is the async story, in Rust you have to decide whether to use Tokio or whatever. That burden is just not present with Go.

Btw this article should not be flagged and it's pathetic that people have flagged it.

I've used Go and Rust professionally and in side projects, and I had used Go first before Rust. When I first used Go, I was like "oh wow, this is so simple and easy", and I didn't realize that I was putting up with the language. Learning Rust was relatively harder, but once I did and wrote some non trivial programs in Rust, it was like a pathway in my brain opened up and was previously blocked, and then when I went back to Go, I was painfully aware of issues that I the programmer had to keep in mind (or write a LOT of boilerplate code to keep track of). Issues that Rust's type system just solves.

The way `nil` can seep into your codebase in Go and how bad the FFI is in Go will prevent me from ever choosing it for a project going forward. And I personally would not feel confident modifying Go code written by someone else, and would not feel confident accepting PRs into my Go codebase unless I understood every line inside and out.

Rust is a breath of fresh air in that regard.

All that said, I think the author here is idealistic in a certain sense. In the scale of "solving a problem by hand (or using Excel/a proprietary tool etc)" to "writing a computer program to automate it", both Go and Rust are very close to each other. And once someone learns Go and knows it well enough, the incremental cost of learning Rust or even thinking about the problems Rust solves for you becomes not worth it. I think that it's sad that this is the way it works, but that's just how it is. It's easy for settle for a local optima like Go when taking into consideration family, pets, salary, time, effort etc.

I do think on a long enough timescale, programmers will eventually move to a "better" language. But in my opinion, that time scale exceeds the lifespan of a human :)