3 ms·

Because we have weird memories we all still remember Go claiming to be a systems programming language, which everyone took to mean "programming language you wou

Because we have weird memories we all still remember Go claiming to be a systems programming language, which everyone took to mean "programming language you would use when you need to talk to metal" but which A) Go isn't suited for B)Rob Pike decided meant "programming language you would use to when you need to write a program" Rust sort of went public around the same time as Go which automatically "made it" a competitor AND actually is a programming language you would use when you need to talk to metal. So now people have tied them up in a PR battle.

untothebreach 11y ago
I think there was the added wrinkle of "programming language made by the company that also makes Chrome" vs "programming language made by the company that also makes Firefox". Google's and Mozilla's browsers were/are competitors, so why wouldn't there programming languages be? Obviously, the two companies have completely different reasons for the development of the new languages, but I think that was overlooked at the time that Rust first came out.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
I'm going with your assessment of things as I think that's why it stays stuck in my head to a degree. The other reason is it was a modern version of Oberon: a simple, GC'd, system language ETH wrote operating systems with. Given that, I still assume an OS can be written in Go in current form or with small changes (eg runtime, FFI). Hell, people wrote OS's in Haskell, Java, and C#. JX partly put the device drivers in Java. I'd be shocked if Go was only one that couldn't handle it.
geofft 11y ago
Yup. It turns out that Google internally uses C++ for developing web applications (or at least HTTP API endpoints), which nobody on the outside quite internalized. So Go is a perfectly reasonable C++ replacement from the point of view of Google, but doesn't hit the majority of use cases outside, and it feels rather more like a compiled competitor to Python/Ruby/etc. to most of us on the outside. Also, until about a year before 1.0, Rust had heavy focus on lightweight concurrency (à la goroutines), a garbage collector built into the language (or at least plans for one, complete with syntax), a mandatory runtime to manage those things, etc. You had to give up on the standard library if you wanted to use Rust code as a shared library in non-Rust programs. That changed fairly rapidly, and the last bits of that (like runtime removal) only hit a few months before 1.0, so people's first impressions of Rust were much closer to that of Go. They're very different languages today. It is technically true that for both of them they are better than C++ for some things people have traditionally used C++ for, but once you get beyond that they're not that similar.

untothebreach 11y ago

I think there was the added wrinkle of "programming language made by the company that also makes Chrome" vs "programming language made by the company that also makes Firefox". Google's and Mozilla's browsers were/are competitors, so why wouldn't there programming languages be? Obviously, the two companies have completely different reasons for the development of the new languages, but I think that was overlooked at the time that Rust first came out.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

I'm going with your assessment of things as I think that's why it stays stuck in my head to a degree. The other reason is it was a modern version of Oberon: a simple, GC'd, system language ETH wrote operating systems with. Given that, I still assume an OS can be written in Go in current form or with small changes (eg runtime, FFI). Hell, people wrote OS's in Haskell, Java, and C#. JX partly put the device drivers in Java. I'd be shocked if Go was only one that couldn't handle it.

geofft 11y ago

Yup. It turns out that Google internally uses C++ for developing web applications (or at least HTTP API endpoints), which nobody on the outside quite internalized. So Go is a perfectly reasonable C++ replacement from the point of view of Google, but doesn't hit the majority of use cases outside, and it feels rather more like a compiled competitor to Python/Ruby/etc. to most of us on the outside. Also, until about a year before 1.0, Rust had heavy focus on lightweight concurrency (à la goroutines), a garbage collector built into the language (or at least plans for one, complete with syntax), a mandatory runtime to manage those things, etc. You had to give up on the standard library if you wanted to use Rust code as a shared library in non-Rust programs. That changed fairly rapidly, and the last bits of that (like runtime removal) only hit a few months before 1.0, so people's first impressions of Rust were much closer to that of Go. They're very different languages today. It is technically true that for both of them they are better than C++ for some things people have traditionally used C++ for, but once you get beyond that they're not that similar.