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The success of Go heralds that of Rust (medium.com/george3d6)
33 points by deweller on Oct 13, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments


Choosing a language is a purely pragmatic issue. You grab the tool that's best suited for a job at hand. I've just started using Go because it's easy to get things done in it and has good tooling and already good libraries.

The time I was most productive with my hobby/shareware programming so far was when I used Realbasic, the Visualbasic clone sold by Andrew Barry as affordable shareware before it became the ultra-expensive mess that is now called Xojo.

Language features are fairly irrelevant, sure Go has some weird oddities for a language of the 21st Century, but it has everything I need to get things done.

As for Rust, I really tried to like it, but so far the only thing I see is an overly complex, anal-retentive language focused on perceived safety but without Ada's readability and long-term maintainability and, just like Ada, without an optional GC but, unlike Ada, without other standard features like integer subtypes and OO with inheritance. I have been downvoted for this just yesterday, there are apparent many ardent language afficionados for Rust on HN, so I need to stop here. I definitely would choose Rust for high-integrity software that doesn't need the guarantees of Spark, but I currently don't write such software.

Go is a great language despite its quirks, verbose error handling and lack of generics because it has a large developer base, compiles fast, compiles to reasonably fast executables, and allows me to get things done relatively fast in certain domains like CLI tools. Unfortunately, it still lacks a good, non-license encumbered cross-platform GUI library, so it's not a full replacement for REALBasic yet. I hope this changes soon, Go would be ideal for developing mid-size desktop applications.


There are many factual errors in this article, and some ridiculous amount of hyperbole. Several Rust developers have already addressed the shortcomings on Reddit [1].

[1] https://reddit.com/r/rust/comments/9nsjmj/the_success_of_go_...


The most important feature of go is it's simplicity. Rusts isn't anywhere near.

It's easy to jump into a new go project and start writing code. Most other languages will fail at this.

People call it opiniated. but I think, it came from writing years of complex code.


This article seems to be missing just how hard it is to learn and use Rust compared to Go. That's a big consideration in the popularity of a language. The article seemed to miss the forest for the trees, as they say.


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