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I feel Go and Rust are great options for writing modern server side applications today, but they exist on two different ends of the spectrum. The Go language is

by jadbox 9y ago

I feel Go and Rust are great options for writing modern server side applications today, but they exist on two different ends of the spectrum. The Go language is highly minimal, constrained, and forces devopers to write unified code, that performs extremely fast idiomatically. This uniformity is helpful for open source collaboration. Rust is a much more robust language (eg generics), but is more complicated to pick up and harder to read by comparison. Imho, Go is ideal for general web services, while Rust is better for system apps, tools, or complex web services like real-time exchanges or financial systems. This is just a general guideline though in my mind.

fpoling 9y ago
Go does not perform "extremely fast idiomatically". There are a lot of cases where replacing channels with semaphores or atomics, avoiding too many go routines etc. can lead to significantly better performance. But Go does perform good enough if one uses simple idiomatic code style while making things relatively safe and maintainable. That is its huge advantage.
EugeneOZ 9y ago
Rust is simple enough for web app needs. It took me about 4 months to start writing code in JavaScript not worse than open source libraries. It took the same time to learn Rust and start writing code, clean and dry enough, with almost 100% tests coverage. Rust gives something Go can't: when you receive warning "variable doesn't need to be mutable", and you know you make it mutable intentionally, you know you just caught huge error (made by human, not compiler). It's just one example, in general I feel compiler is my best friend, always 100% honest to me.
shmerl 9y ago
You contrast them only by complexity, but the actual reason for it goes further. Go achieves simplicity through a major trade off of using garbage collector. That's a price that you need to pay just for using Go. Rust on the other hand doesn't impose it, following the approach of letting you decide what you want to pay for. This results in higher complexity. So it's good to remember that simplicity of Go doesn't come for free.
flavio81 9y ago
>Imho, Go is ideal for ... tons of boilerplate working fast yet slower than C/Rust/C++.

by jadbox 9y ago

fpoling 9y ago

Go does not perform "extremely fast idiomatically". There are a lot of cases where replacing channels with semaphores or atomics, avoiding too many go routines etc. can lead to significantly better performance. But Go does perform good enough if one uses simple idiomatic code style while making things relatively safe and maintainable. That is its huge advantage.

EugeneOZ 9y ago

Rust is simple enough for web app needs. It took me about 4 months to start writing code in JavaScript not worse than open source libraries. It took the same time to learn Rust and start writing code, clean and dry enough, with almost 100% tests coverage. Rust gives something Go can't: when you receive warning "variable doesn't need to be mutable", and you know you make it mutable intentionally, you know you just caught huge error (made by human, not compiler). It's just one example, in general I feel compiler is my best friend, always 100% honest to me.

shmerl 9y ago

You contrast them only by complexity, but the actual reason for it goes further. Go achieves simplicity through a major trade off of using garbage collector. That's a price that you need to pay just for using Go. Rust on the other hand doesn't impose it, following the approach of letting you decide what you want to pay for. This results in higher complexity. So it's good to remember that simplicity of Go doesn't come for free.

flavio81 9y ago

>Imho, Go is ideal for ... tons of boilerplate working fast yet slower than C/Rust/C++.