Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But, it is verbose and generally takes longer time to write and understand compared to Go. I respectfully disagree, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who have used both languages professionally would agree with me. Reading or writing N lines of Go is easier and faster than reading or writing N lines of Rust, true. But you have to repeat yourself so much in Go…
I can’t claim to have been paid to write rust, but I’ve written code professionally for many years now and most of them in Go. I have also written my fair share of rust code for web applications. The repetition in Go, in my experience, mostly happens at the beginning and then you only have to deal with ‘if err != equal nil’, which to be fair is probably a good thing. Is it really more verbose and repetitive than erro…
Of course.
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
?
But Go verbosity and repetition isn't limited to error handling. Another example is e.g. the lack of any metaprogramming capabilities (e.g. macros) which forces you to either copy and paste code or write a code generator in many cases (or use runtime reflection).
> I would love to have the type system rust has in go.
Unfortunately you will never get it, because Rob Pike's ideology is "if it didn't exist in C, it's too complicated and difficult for Go programmers to understand".
This isn't a joke or exaggeration -- programmers being too stupid to understand modern features has actually been cited as one of the main design constraints of Go.
> But I don’t think most applications need that.
Of course nothing needs it, just like nothing needs function calls (it was possible to write large applications in assembly language). But most applications (including all the ones I've ever written) benefit from it. Rust's type system is there to make it easier to write programs, not to make your life harder.
> My experience tells me something different than yours, maybe I’m wrong.
I wrote Rust professionally for 5 years and Go so far for about 6 months (and even that was not spent full-time on Go). So I don't claim to be an expert. But I am constantly running into things that Go makes difficult or impossible that would be a breeze in Rust.