>Rust is objectively harder to write than Go (or any other GC-language) because it exposes more concerns for the programmer to take care of.
comparing apples to apples: Once you get a tiny bit of experience, almost all of that goes away. The common patterns and idioms in the language allow you to write whole programs without ever thinking about lifetimes or memory allocation or anything else different from the gc language case.
comparing apples to oranges: you do need to worry about those things when writing tricky memory management code that you couldn't even get from most gc lanuages... yeah then you have to worry about the things since it's a case where those things are the point.
> You could argue Rust still has an advantage in that it prevents bugs that in Go you're free to write, but then what you're claiming is that this compensates for the extra work you have to do upfront in Rust.
I have evidence in the form of multiple services and programs running in prod under heavy use for years without having to revist the code to deal with bugs. Meanwhile the stuff written in go has to be touched a lot to deal with bugs. The extra couple of weeks upfront to do it in rust is mitigated after the first incident with the go code. The effort proves worthwhile after the second incident.
Also tangentially related: the cost of an incident in the form of lost business, refunds, etc is usually far higher than the cost of a couple developer weeks.
>because an experienced Go developer probably has internalized how to avoid those bugs and the cost of preventing them can be nearly negligible
Some of them yes. But this is literally the same argument I'm making about rust experience meaning that you don't spend all that much extra effort up-front. Like I said, I'm about equally productive in go, python or rust.
> I think that's why most people seem to agree Rust is probably only advantageous where the cost of data races in production is higher than the cognitive cost (which translates into increased effort) on the programmer.
I think people who say this haven't gotten much experience in rust. In my experience they spent a week trying to learn rust and decided to stop and compare it to their years of other languages and paradigms.