The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust

Post by Mawr » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 1:56 PM UTC

vips7L wrote: post #335

jpc0 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Golang has a whole lot of weird, pointless quirks in both its base language and standard library Having used go in anger I don’t necessarily agree with this, could you point out an example. Maybe I just accepted it and work around it without paying much attention. If you are referring to interface types being able to be null, well they are allocated on the heap and have dynamic dispatch, this isn’t particularly a s…

Here’s a great read on its quirks, and where it really isn’t “simple”: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-... https://dave.cheney.net/2014/03/19/channel-axioms

Post by Mawr » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 2:04 PM UTC

devjab wrote: post #273

zozbot234 wrote: post #251

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Unfortunately, Golang has a whole lot of weird, pointless quirks in both its base language and standard library, compared to something with a more elegant and from-the-ground-up design, like Rust itself or perhaps OCaml/ReasonML. Not very good news if you want the language to just "get the hell out of your way". I suppose it's still way better than the "enterprise" favored alternative of Java/C# though!

I worked with C# for a decade and it's become a really great general purpose language. I'd still prefer never to work with it ever again after having worked with Go. This isn't for technical reasons at all, but because Golang is so easy to work with for "people reasons". There are brilliant parts of Go, but the only thing I find myself missing in other languages is the simplistic module isolation, where every folder…

    if (something != 1) {
     panic("oh no!")
    }

    assert(something != 1, "oh no!")

Post by Mawr » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #294

camgunz wrote: post #291

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The "X is like Y but Z" game w languages is pretty fun, and kind of illuminating as to what one thing you pick. Go is like C but with concurrency/strings/GC/a good stdlib Go is like C++ but simpler/fast compilation/no generics/a good stdlib Go is like Python but statically typed/multithreaded/fast/single executable Go is like Java but native/no OO --- One thing Go haters rarely reckon with is that Go is the only popu…

> One thing Go haters rarely reckon with is that Go is the only popular modern language (ie from this millennium). This requires you to squint so that "popular" happens to identify only a handful of languages but conveniently catches Go and not say Swift or Rust. It's not difficult to do this, but it's not very honest to yourself.

Post by ModernMech » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #327

Sesse__ wrote: post #296

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> One thing Go haters rarely reckon with is that Go is the only popular modern language (ie from this millennium). Everything else is way older. Rust. TypeScript. Swift.

I wrote a reply to a sibling comment here [0], but wanted to reemphasize that Rust and Swift are far from popular. I think it bears repeating because the gap between a Rust/Swift and Go is notable, but the gap between a Rust/Swift and Java is a chasm. I would guess this isn't the intuition of an HNer (it wasn't mine until I dug in for this discussion haha)

Post by ModernMech » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

Degorath wrote: post #284

zozbot234 wrote: post #255

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Flamebait? It's literally what the designers of Golang said publicly about the background of prospective developers, and how that constrained the language design: "The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They're typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They're not capable of understanding a brilliant lang…

Nowhere in this quote are these fresh grads equated to "lousy programmers", though (which the flamebaity comment did). And interpreting the quote charitably I'm going to have to agree with it - I don't think many of my coworkers care enough to get to the point where they'd appreciate everything something like Haskell can do for them.