As someone who programs in both Rust and Go, I wish that Rust developers would put more effort into improving the Rust ecosystem than complaining about Go.
Languages are tools and not tribes.
I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
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Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#12I have turned this comment into a blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618264 It is a well written and in-depth look at the rot inside the Golang ecosystem. Make sure to read to the end and notice that the rot started at the core contributors level. Golang's tagline, from their [repository][0], is "Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient softw…
As a systems developer with 20 years of experience in a variety of languages, I share your general frustration with Go. But I don't agree with any of the changes you suggested in GoFY.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#13I don’t think this should surprise anyone. Go is an excellent language for quick prototyping and easy distribution. The investment to become fluent in Go might literally be an order of magnitude less than becoming fluent in rust. Rust might be the perfect language in terms of capabilities and safety, but it is far from a simple language. The function signatures from even some simple methods have become ridiculous. I’…
> The investment to become fluent in Go might literally be an order of magnitude less than becoming fluent in rust.
From my own experience with both languages, it's actually closer to two orders of magnitude. One order of magnitude might be correct for the language, but Rust requires you to navigate the ecosystem very early on [1], whereas Go gets you much farther with its stdlib in its common usecases.
[1] For example, you pretty much immediately have to decide "Tokio vs async-std vs std" if you want to do anything with IO, or "Actix vs Rocket vs whatever" for HTTP, at a point where you probably cannot gauge the ramifications of these choices properly.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#14I have turned this comment into a blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618264 It is a well written and in-depth look at the rot inside the Golang ecosystem. Make sure to read to the end and notice that the rot started at the core contributors level. Golang's tagline, from their [repository][0], is "Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient softw…
> "Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software."
This claim is mostly accurate from my experience if amended to "Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software as long as you don't do stuff Rob Pike didn't expect."
I'm going to count "run on Windows" and "have non-UTF-8 filenames" among these.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#15The most insightful way I've ever heard Go described is as a "C fanfic". It's like a bunch of C programmers, writing software for web infrastructure, got together and made a wish-list of things they wanted to be different about C (specifically in the context of writing web infrastructure). And then they made a new language, taking the most direct path toward that wish-list, and inheriting most of C's other traits as…
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Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#16Another day, another repost. It's a great article, but at some point it should be given a rest.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#17As someone who programs in both Rust and Go, I wish that Rust developers would put more effort into improving the Rust ecosystem than complaining about Go. Languages are tools and not tribes.
From reading the blog, he only started getting into rust because of issues with Go, so this seems a pretty unfair criticism here.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#18As someone who programs in both Rust and Go, I wish that Rust developers would put more effort into improving the Rust ecosystem than complaining about Go. Languages are tools and not tribes.
> Languages are tools and not tribes.
That's incorrect.
The tribe is the more important feature than the programming language.
C became the tribe of "systems programmers". Lisp rose and fell with the initial tribe of AI. Perl was the tribe of the system administrator and fell when they did. Ruby rose and fell with the tribe of Rails. Python is riding the tribe of numerics.
The language needs to at least be not actively hostile to the tribe, but after that it's pretty irrelevant.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#19Wow, inconsistency across Operating systems "papered over" to look like Unix everywhere and a library importing the world is enough to make you think Rust is better than Go?
Yikes.
Re: I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride (2020)
#20I don’t think this should surprise anyone. Go is an excellent language for quick prototyping and easy distribution. The investment to become fluent in Go might literally be an order of magnitude less than becoming fluent in rust. Rust might be the perfect language in terms of capabilities and safety, but it is far from a simple language. The function signatures from even some simple methods have become ridiculous. I’…
I tried learning go a few times years ago but got stuck with tooling issues and when I made it to work I was put off by the syntax / verbosity, error messages and never managed to learn it.
I started doing a project in rust and things just made a lot of sense (with previous haskell, C/C++, JS experience), fixing compiler errors until green was easy. Eventually I developed an understanding for fixing lifetime related issues, which is the only complicated bit in rust (and hard to fix ones are not even that common).
I'm definitely more confident in the correctness of my programs written in rust than anything else - even than haskell, my previous gold standard experience, given the lack of GC and laziness.
I think different people will grok different languages.
From a maintainability point of view, from what I experienced in a few companies, most developers will not feel comfortable with either go or rust.