I’ve been using Go professionally for a while now, since before the first GopherCon, which I think was back in 2014. Coming from a mainly Ruby and JavaScript wo

I’ve been using Go professionally for a while now, since before the first GopherCon, which I think was back in 2014. Coming from a mainly Ruby and JavaScript world, Go was a vast improvement over what I had been used to. The compiler was fast, the language was simple, and the concurrency patterns were nice. Writing backend HTTP APIs was pretty simple and I was happy. I’ve always loved playing with languages, so over the same period of time Rust was a language I’d often tinker with. It never really felt great for web stuff, but I kept going back to it to toy around with maybe a CLI here and there. Fast forward to the pandemic and I found myself with a lot more free time at home, coupled with a newly mature async story in Rust, and everything changed for me. The error handling due to algebraic types is phenomenal (particularly with the ‘anyhow’ and ‘thiserror’ crates), rust-analyzer in my emacs is awesome, type safe SQL with sqlx is amazing, cargo is great, compiler error messages are super clear, and the list goes on. I just started a new project with a client and the backend is written in Go, and honestly it’s a bit of a let down having to go back to it. It’s totally fine, it just doesn’t feel beautiful to me. Seeing empty interfaces with type casting makes me cringe (I mean it always has) and I’m really going to miss the Rust error handling. Thankfully a lot of this project I’m going to be able to use AWS lambda for and I’ll just use TypeScript since the front end team is using it there (no one is comfortable with Rust). tldr; Go is a simple language that will let a team get things done and it’s easy enough for any developer to onboard with it. But personally I wouldn’t reach for it ever again because of Rust (and even TypeScript).