7 ms·

Ask HN: Why would you choose Rust over Go or Node?

53 points by deadcoder0904 8y ago

red_admiral 8y ago
You wouldn't. You'd choose it over C for your next TLS implementation, not over Go for your next web application.
- mseepgood 8y ago
  Or just import "crypto/tls".
- mschwaig 8y ago
  I would like to add that a Ruby or Node developer might very well want to rewrite some performance-critical service in Rust, which the strict language enables them to do without shooting themselves in the foot too much.
jaytaylor 8y ago
Caveat Emptor :: Disclaimers 1. This is based on my experience, so YMMV and there are many cases where more than one way can work well! 2. I appreciate pragmatism. Try to use an appropriate tool for the job. 3. I identify as a polyglot, and have used Go and node.js extensively for 8+ years (and other languages for many more years than this). 4. Of the three languages listed, Rust is my weakest. That said, I always enjoy reading about it and learning about the design philosophy and choices. --- Rust: If/when I had the luxury of enough time to actually learn rust :) ..and one or more of the following were true: - Cases requiring eeking out max performance and guarantees about program safety / correctness. - Real-time or soft (near) real-time is a serious requirement. - targeting embedded applications or other highly resource-constrained runtime environments. Node.js: Great for frontend work and single page apps. Also a goto when I know there's already a decent library written that will do what is required. Go: Shines for a few classes of problems: - Command-line apps and systems work - it can be a very quick way to a working solution, and also reasonable to create reliable and robust applications compared to many other languages. - Situations where ease of deployment is important. Distributing a single binary can eliminate drastic amounts of complexity. - Problems where it's useful to trivially spin up many concurrent processes. Then, for most other things there's Python, bash, Java / Groovy / JVM, and C. --- grin No matter what, have fun!
matthewmacleod 8y ago
“Why would you choose a motorbike over a hanglider or a catamaran?” Different technologies might all be able to get you to your destination, but some are going to be more suited than others. This depends heavily or a wide variety of different factors. Large team or small team? High throughput or low throughout? Simple or complex? The variables are too diverse to offer a meaningful answer. Use Rust when performance and safety are paramount. Use Go when you need to write a thin network-aware app or API. Use Node when you have an excess of JavaScript talent…
- tracker1 8y ago
  I came to say mostly the same... Rust is great for absolute control, and definitely in low-level scenarios (drivers, libraries, etc). Go is great for network services and alike. Where I find node shines is when it comes down to time to market, or orchestrating disparate platforms together. Node works great as a glue layer. Not that Go doesn't, but the amount of developer time to do it is quite a bit lower in Node imho, with a more agile approach. I'm a pretty big fan of web-facing applications talking to a service written with Node that will in turn talk to other systems behind it. It's probably the easiest place to transport that weirdly bound WS* service to something easier to consume in a different language. If/when performance is an issue, you have a working prototype for a Go rewrite. Most of the same network scaling issues apply to all of the above. And as an aside, all service authors should have to write a client in a static and dynamic language.
steveklabnik 8y ago
One thing we're seeing is that this isn't an either/or choice: for example, Bouyant's latest product, Conduit, is both Rust and Go. Projects like Neon let you extend Node with Rust, and there's been a lot of interest in using Rust through wasm in Node as well as the browser. https://conduit.io/ https://conduit.io/ https://www.neon-bindings.com/ https://www.neon-bindings.com/
- vkjv 8y ago
  +1 for Neon! The best part about Rust is that it changes this question to "what language AND Rust?" Node + Rust is a great experience.
mschwaig 8y ago
Rust puts you very close to the metal, which can be great for writing high performance code, while forcing you to be very explicit about how you use memory. This is great if memory managment and high performance are a big concern for you, if they are not you might want to choose a language like Go or Node which allow you to gloss over such details until they really become an issue. Do not fix problems you do not have by throwing Rust at them, but feel free make the climb of learning it to expand you horizon. :)
- vvanders 8y ago
  I'll throw out one more, which is that Rust does a great job at running on a diverse set of platforms(this is distinct from architectures). If you wanted to run one codebase across Desktop(Win32, OSX, Linux), Mobile(Android, iOS) and Web(Asm.js/WASM) you'd usually have to resort to a scripting(perf-impact) or C/C++(compiler differences, poor dependency management). With Rust I can do all that one from one Cargo.toml and a codebase that just works for all my platforms(modulo any forking inside libs that use "target(win32)", etc). For someone who's done that most of their career it was amazing to see how solid and straightforward that is with Rust.
- Yoric 8y ago
  In my experience, this is true not just of memory management, but also of all sorts of safety guarantees. I currently write a (de)compression library in Rust, and the type system is very helpful for all sorts of things beyond memory management. I would not write that specific code in Node.
- deadcoder0904 8y ago
  > Do not fix problems you do not have by throwing Rust at them Thank you. I write mostly Node & wanted to try Go for a long time because of performance & then I heard that Rust is even faster. So I thought I would learn that. But you are right, I don't have any problem with Node. Its working great for me. :)
jf 8y ago
Rust excels at giving you fine-grain control over how your code runs. This was important to me recently, when I found I couldn't prevent Go from using threads: I recently wrote the same UNIX PAM module in Go, Python, and Rust. I started with Go because I enjoy writing Go and the Go compiler can generate shared libraries. Go didn't work out because Go's use of threads resulted difficult-to-debug conflicts with the use of fork(2) in sshd - after realizing that the issue was related to threading, I found that you can write PAM modules using the excellent pam-python [1] package. The code I wrote in Python worked great, but I really wanted to generate a module as a stand-alone shared object binary, so I re-wrote the code using Rust, which worked great. Footnote: 1: http://pam-python.sourceforge.net/ http://pam-python.sourceforge.net/
- Daviey 8y ago
  What did the modules do? Would you be willing to open source it? (Curious to see how the implementation between the 3 differs, even if the go one is non-functional)
smogcutter 8y ago
Rust is a great choice for posting fan fiction about which software someone else should rewrite in Rust.
crtc 8y ago
Why would you choose a coconut over a watermelon or a football?
Yoric 8y ago
I currently write an application that uses both Rust and Node. Rust for everything that needs strong typing and performance, Node to take advantage of the existing ecosystem. In my mind, this pretty much summarizes the respective advantages of both technologies. My knowledge of Go limits itself to "Hello, world", so I can't speak for or against that technology.
mamcx 8y ago
I have a simple test to know what to chosee. I try to pick the HARDEST and MOST COMPLEX task(s) I need to do and see which one give me the easier/better/faster/etc path torwards it. Easy things are easy, but sometimes hard things are almost impossible with the wrong tool.
flavio81 8y ago
>Why would you choose Rust over Go or Node? Oh Jesus, here we go again. They are catering to different domains! Node is intended for doing backend programming for supporting web applications. And there are many better alternatives IMO. Rust is intended for systems programming manly (not limited to that, of course). It also would be good for certain high-performance backends. As for Go, I'll let Rob Pike (Go creator) explain the reason for Go: 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 language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Every single time I read this Rob Pike quote I have an overwhelming desire to find Rob, take him out for beers and ask him, off the record, what he thinks of the Google hiring processes. Because what he's saying here is, in my opinion at least, anathema to company line about who they hire.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - machinemob 8y ago
    What is the company line that you're referring to that Rob Pike contradicts?
    - Jtsummers 8y ago
      > The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. I know things have changed, but in the early '00s good luck getting hired to Google without a PhD, masters minimum. 4.0 dual major in CS and psychology from Georgia Tech, graduated in 4 years with both of those degrees. Yeah, no thanks. [Not me, a friend of mine who wanted to work for them] They always insisted, at every hiring event I attended through around 2008, that they only hired the "best of the best" and things like that. If that's true, then this: > They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language Isn't true. So Rob has it right and Google is hiring really mediocre people. Or Rob has it wrong but only saw the mediocre hires. EDIT: Cleaned up the grammar a bit.
Anderkent 8y ago
Why would you ever want to write go or typescript? Rust is the only language in those three with reasonable semantics
mabynogy 8y ago
Node because dynamic typing is easier to work with and it's nearly as fast as a compiled language. I'd just recommend to avoid npm.
- filleduchaos 8y ago
  JavaScript in the context of Node is a (just-in-time) compiled language. And compilation in and of itself is not a magical conferrer of speed or resource efficiency, and there is a wide range of performance among compiled languages. A shitty compiler will produce shitty machine code. And while V8 is an amazing project, there's the mild inconvenience of JS/Node not even approaching languages like C, C++ or Rust in speed or memory efficiency.
  - mabynogy 8y ago
    It is faster in real life when you include compiletimes.
    - filleduchaos 8y ago
      I mean, if you want to go right ahead and admit that you have so few users/your users use your product so little that build time is a significant metric for you vs runtime performance costs, I won't stop you
      - mabynogy 8y ago
        Javascript is one the most used language. Even HN uses it a bit.
- bwbw223 8y ago
  How is dynamic typing easier? It makes it way easier to introduce bugs- Recently I was working on a timer (for speedsolving Rubik's cubes) and I had accidentally had tried to format an already formatted time for user display, so all that was shown was `undefined` for times over a minute. It was hard to uncover, because the calls were in seperate parts of the codebase, and I wasn't able to make the field/formatter only allow numbers because of the nature of Javascript.
pornel 8y ago
I use Node and Golang for small to medium-size programs which are mostly network-bound. They're very good for getting something up quickly, and performance is not a problem unless you have to de/serialize tons of data. When I need something to go faster, or have bulletproof reliability, I use Rust. The type system requires more work up front, but then it guarantees you won't chase unexpected `nil`/`undefined`. It has fast and incredibly convenient de/serialization with Serde. Fearless multicore computation with Rayon. It's good at number crunching, and gives enough low-level control to manipulate large data structures with little memory overhead.
borplk 8y ago
Not directly an answer to your question. Rust is often a good choice in place of "large project in C/C++". The safety features of Rust helps you maintain correctness as the project grows. At 500 lines Rust may be somewhat inconvenient and C seems fine (at least for someone new to Rust). As the size grows most C/C++ projects tend to go out of control (unless they are really strict and serious) with a continuous repetitive stream of "oops null pointer over here" ... "oops forgot to free over here". As the size grows the inconvenience of Rust fades and it starts to provide more value.
d0m 8y ago
The older I get and the grumpier I get, the more I want my code to be statically typed and verified at compile time because I don't like to be awaken in the middle of the night for a stupid null/undefined issue. Also, as much as I like to have a clean test coverage, most tests go away when you have a good type system. In the end, I find Rust to strike the right balance between expressiveness and correctness. Unlike C/C++ where you can shoot yourself in the foot, with Rust you're forced to write thread and memory-leak safe code. And in the end, Rust code often look much cleaner AND safer than the C++ equivalent.. what's not to like.
Chyzwar 8y ago
Depends: go -> fast, easy to deploy services talking to other services. node.js -> full-stack developers rapidly developing a product. rust -> safer language than C/C++ but with the same performance.

53 points by deadcoder0904 8y ago

red_admiral 8y ago

You wouldn't. You'd choose it over C for your next TLS implementation, not over Go for your next web application.

mseepgood 8y ago
Or just import "crypto/tls".
mschwaig 8y ago
I would like to add that a Ruby or Node developer might very well want to rewrite some performance-critical service in Rust, which the strict language enables them to do without shooting themselves in the foot too much.

jaytaylor 8y ago

Caveat Emptor :: Disclaimers 1. This is based on my experience, so YMMV and there are many cases where more than one way can work well! 2. I appreciate pragmatism. Try to use an appropriate tool for the job. 3. I identify as a polyglot, and have used Go and node.js extensively for 8+ years (and other languages for many more years than this). 4. Of the three languages listed, Rust is my weakest. That said, I always enjoy reading about it and learning about the design philosophy and choices. --- Rust: If/when I had the luxury of enough time to actually learn rust :) ..and one or more of the following were true: - Cases requiring eeking out max performance and guarantees about program safety / correctness. - Real-time or soft (near) real-time is a serious requirement. - targeting embedded applications or other highly resource-constrained runtime environments. Node.js: Great for frontend work and single page apps. Also a goto when I know there's already a decent library written that will do what is required. Go: Shines for a few classes of problems: - Command-line apps and systems work - it can be a very quick way to a working solution, and also reasonable to create reliable and robust applications compared to many other languages. - Situations where ease of deployment is important. Distributing a single binary can eliminate drastic amounts of complexity. - Problems where it's useful to trivially spin up many concurrent processes. Then, for most other things there's Python, bash, Java / Groovy / JVM, and C. --- grin No matter what, have fun!

matthewmacleod 8y ago

“Why would you choose a motorbike over a hanglider or a catamaran?” Different technologies might all be able to get you to your destination, but some are going to be more suited than others. This depends heavily or a wide variety of different factors. Large team or small team? High throughput or low throughout? Simple or complex? The variables are too diverse to offer a meaningful answer. Use Rust when performance and safety are paramount. Use Go when you need to write a thin network-aware app or API. Use Node when you have an excess of JavaScript talent…

tracker1 8y ago
I came to say mostly the same... Rust is great for absolute control, and definitely in low-level scenarios (drivers, libraries, etc). Go is great for network services and alike. Where I find node shines is when it comes down to time to market, or orchestrating disparate platforms together. Node works great as a glue layer. Not that Go doesn't, but the amount of developer time to do it is quite a bit lower in Node imho, with a more agile approach. I'm a pretty big fan of web-facing applications talking to a service written with Node that will in turn talk to other systems behind it. It's probably the easiest place to transport that weirdly bound WS* service to something easier to consume in a different language. If/when performance is an issue, you have a working prototype for a Go rewrite. Most of the same network scaling issues apply to all of the above. And as an aside, all service authors should have to write a client in a static and dynamic language.

steveklabnik 8y ago

One thing we're seeing is that this isn't an either/or choice: for example, Bouyant's latest product, Conduit, is both Rust and Go. Projects like Neon let you extend Node with Rust, and there's been a lot of interest in using Rust through wasm in Node as well as the browser. https://conduit.io/ https://conduit.io/ https://www.neon-bindings.com/ https://www.neon-bindings.com/

vkjv 8y ago
+1 for Neon! The best part about Rust is that it changes this question to "what language AND Rust?" Node + Rust is a great experience.

mschwaig 8y ago

Rust puts you very close to the metal, which can be great for writing high performance code, while forcing you to be very explicit about how you use memory. This is great if memory managment and high performance are a big concern for you, if they are not you might want to choose a language like Go or Node which allow you to gloss over such details until they really become an issue. Do not fix problems you do not have by throwing Rust at them, but feel free make the climb of learning it to expand you horizon. :)

vvanders 8y ago
I'll throw out one more, which is that Rust does a great job at running on a diverse set of platforms(this is distinct from architectures). If you wanted to run one codebase across Desktop(Win32, OSX, Linux), Mobile(Android, iOS) and Web(Asm.js/WASM) you'd usually have to resort to a scripting(perf-impact) or C/C++(compiler differences, poor dependency management). With Rust I can do all that one from one Cargo.toml and a codebase that just works for all my platforms(modulo any forking inside libs that use "target(win32)", etc). For someone who's done that most of their career it was amazing to see how solid and straightforward that is with Rust.
Yoric 8y ago
In my experience, this is true not just of memory management, but also of all sorts of safety guarantees. I currently write a (de)compression library in Rust, and the type system is very helpful for all sorts of things beyond memory management. I would not write that specific code in Node.
deadcoder0904 8y ago
> Do not fix problems you do not have by throwing Rust at them Thank you. I write mostly Node & wanted to try Go for a long time because of performance & then I heard that Rust is even faster. So I thought I would learn that. But you are right, I don't have any problem with Node. Its working great for me. :)

jf 8y ago

Rust excels at giving you fine-grain control over how your code runs. This was important to me recently, when I found I couldn't prevent Go from using threads: I recently wrote the same UNIX PAM module in Go, Python, and Rust. I started with Go because I enjoy writing Go and the Go compiler can generate shared libraries. Go didn't work out because Go's use of threads resulted difficult-to-debug conflicts with the use of fork(2) in sshd - after realizing that the issue was related to threading, I found that you can write PAM modules using the excellent pam-python [1] package. The code I wrote in Python worked great, but I really wanted to generate a module as a stand-alone shared object binary, so I re-wrote the code using Rust, which worked great. Footnote: 1: http://pam-python.sourceforge.net/ http://pam-python.sourceforge.net/

Daviey 8y ago
What did the modules do? Would you be willing to open source it? (Curious to see how the implementation between the 3 differs, even if the go one is non-functional)

smogcutter 8y ago

Rust is a great choice for posting fan fiction about which software someone else should rewrite in Rust.

crtc 8y ago

Why would you choose a coconut over a watermelon or a football?

Yoric 8y ago

I currently write an application that uses both Rust and Node. Rust for everything that needs strong typing and performance, Node to take advantage of the existing ecosystem. In my mind, this pretty much summarizes the respective advantages of both technologies. My knowledge of Go limits itself to "Hello, world", so I can't speak for or against that technology.

mamcx 8y ago

I have a simple test to know what to chosee. I try to pick the HARDEST and MOST COMPLEX task(s) I need to do and see which one give me the easier/better/faster/etc path torwards it. Easy things are easy, but sometimes hard things are almost impossible with the wrong tool.

flavio81 8y ago

>Why would you choose Rust over Go or Node? Oh Jesus, here we go again. They are catering to different domains! Node is intended for doing backend programming for supporting web applications. And there are many better alternatives IMO. Rust is intended for systems programming manly (not limited to that, of course). It also would be good for certain high-performance backends. As for Go, I'll let Rob Pike (Go creator) explain the reason for Go: 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 language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt.

hinkley 8y ago
Every single time I read this Rob Pike quote I have an overwhelming desire to find Rob, take him out for beers and ask him, off the record, what he thinks of the Google hiring processes. Because what he's saying here is, in my opinion at least, anathema to company line about who they hire.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- machinemob 8y ago
  What is the company line that you're referring to that Rob Pike contradicts?
  - Jtsummers 8y ago
    > The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. I know things have changed, but in the early '00s good luck getting hired to Google without a PhD, masters minimum. 4.0 dual major in CS and psychology from Georgia Tech, graduated in 4 years with both of those degrees. Yeah, no thanks. [Not me, a friend of mine who wanted to work for them] They always insisted, at every hiring event I attended through around 2008, that they only hired the "best of the best" and things like that. If that's true, then this: > They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language Isn't true. So Rob has it right and Google is hiring really mediocre people. Or Rob has it wrong but only saw the mediocre hires. EDIT: Cleaned up the grammar a bit.

Anderkent 8y ago

Why would you ever want to write go or typescript? Rust is the only language in those three with reasonable semantics

mabynogy 8y ago

Node because dynamic typing is easier to work with and it's nearly as fast as a compiled language. I'd just recommend to avoid npm.

filleduchaos 8y ago
JavaScript in the context of Node is a (just-in-time) compiled language. And compilation in and of itself is not a magical conferrer of speed or resource efficiency, and there is a wide range of performance among compiled languages. A shitty compiler will produce shitty machine code. And while V8 is an amazing project, there's the mild inconvenience of JS/Node not even approaching languages like C, C++ or Rust in speed or memory efficiency.
- mabynogy 8y ago
  It is faster in real life when you include compiletimes.
  - filleduchaos 8y ago
    I mean, if you want to go right ahead and admit that you have so few users/your users use your product so little that build time is a significant metric for you vs runtime performance costs, I won't stop you
    - mabynogy 8y ago
      Javascript is one the most used language. Even HN uses it a bit.
bwbw223 8y ago
How is dynamic typing easier? It makes it way easier to introduce bugs- Recently I was working on a timer (for speedsolving Rubik's cubes) and I had accidentally had tried to format an already formatted time for user display, so all that was shown was `undefined` for times over a minute. It was hard to uncover, because the calls were in seperate parts of the codebase, and I wasn't able to make the field/formatter only allow numbers because of the nature of Javascript.

pornel 8y ago

I use Node and Golang for small to medium-size programs which are mostly network-bound. They're very good for getting something up quickly, and performance is not a problem unless you have to de/serialize tons of data. When I need something to go faster, or have bulletproof reliability, I use Rust. The type system requires more work up front, but then it guarantees you won't chase unexpected `nil`/`undefined`. It has fast and incredibly convenient de/serialization with Serde. Fearless multicore computation with Rayon. It's good at number crunching, and gives enough low-level control to manipulate large data structures with little memory overhead.

borplk 8y ago

Not directly an answer to your question. Rust is often a good choice in place of "large project in C/C++". The safety features of Rust helps you maintain correctness as the project grows. At 500 lines Rust may be somewhat inconvenient and C seems fine (at least for someone new to Rust). As the size grows most C/C++ projects tend to go out of control (unless they are really strict and serious) with a continuous repetitive stream of "oops null pointer over here" ... "oops forgot to free over here". As the size grows the inconvenience of Rust fades and it starts to provide more value.

d0m 8y ago

The older I get and the grumpier I get, the more I want my code to be statically typed and verified at compile time because I don't like to be awaken in the middle of the night for a stupid null/undefined issue. Also, as much as I like to have a clean test coverage, most tests go away when you have a good type system. In the end, I find Rust to strike the right balance between expressiveness and correctness. Unlike C/C++ where you can shoot yourself in the foot, with Rust you're forced to write thread and memory-leak safe code. And in the end, Rust code often look much cleaner AND safer than the C++ equivalent.. what's not to like.

Chyzwar 8y ago

Depends: go -> fast, easy to deploy services talking to other services. node.js -> full-stack developers rapidly developing a product. rust -> safer language than C/C++ but with the same performance.