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Go is quite arguably a worse language though, including certain fundamental cornerstones of modern web development. Ever tried to see what fields a JSON payload

Go is quite arguably a worse language though, including certain fundamental cornerstones of modern web development. Ever tried to see what fields a JSON payload contains in an "idiomatic" way before casting it to a type in Go? It's all interface{} (now Any) and reflection. If we're talking about developers new to a language, I'd argue that Rust's type system is easier to grok than the cases you may need to account for in Go.

tptacek 4y ago
I'm not interested in the language war. It's just the case that Rust is both more difficult to learn --- especially if you've never worked in an unmanaged runtime before --- and more difficult to write. Which language is "better" is undecidable.
- yumraj 4y ago
  Harder than C++? Harder to use than C? Above is a question, not a snark. I like learning languages and haven’t dabbled in Rust so am curious.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    C++ vs. Rust is a tricky question. C++ is easier to write in, but it's harder to get programs working in it. Rust is harder to write, but it's much more likely that your first execution is going to do something useful. But they're of comparable complexity.
    - elcritch 4y ago
      Second this. Rust also follows some habits of C++ like verbose syntax and accidental complexity. There was an article recently where a Rust port of a C++ application ended up being comparable in lines of code.
  - sn9 4y ago
    There's a sense in which people are saying it's easier to learn other languages than Rust because it's easier to get to code that compiles so you can start building new features. There's a different sense that I feel is being overlooked by those people in that the problems you run into with Rust are frequently actual flaws or bugs in your code, and the compiler shouldn't be thought of an adversary blocking your way to feature development but a teacher showing you the things you're overlooking. So once you put in the upfront cost of learning how to write Rust that compiles, you get code that's much more maintainable, correct, and easy to refactor. So for someone that likes learning languages, I'd say choosing to learn Rust is a great choice and will teach you things you can take with you to other languages.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  I'm sure this is true for some people, but I found in Go their "Don't Be Clever" just drove me nuts. There's a thin layer where it's fine, and then once you get beyond that your options are Be Clever (Nope, Go tells you not to even try) or Give Up, I gave up. Whereas in Rust I was able to keep going. Sometimes, when I dug down I reached something truly enlightening like the implementation of core::mem::drop -- pub fn drop<T>(_x: T) { } [ Yes I said implementation, that's not a typo, that's the actual implementation. ] Sometimes, it's all fucking turtles, e.g. Aria's famous "Pre-pooping your pants" essay and her "Tower of Weakenings". There's bad news, but if you don't like that we also have more and different bad news. And sometimes it was a voyage of discovery, but it was an interesting voyage, I learned much and I felt invigorated and encouraged. For example why C++ std::vector's reserve is not Rust's Vec::reserve but Vec::reserve_exact or why Rust's functions each have unique unnameable types, or how MaybeUninit actually works.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I have no trouble believing that there are programmers who enjoy writing Rust more than they enjoy Go, and many of those programmers are probably faster when they're not being irritated by the language they're working in. But I simply don't buy arguments that Rust is easier to pick up, or even as easy. Go is a garbage collected, managed runtime. Rust is in some ways harder to write than C++. The very last thing I'm here to do is to advocate for Go over Rust, or vice versa. But there are some basic facts about the languages we should be able to recognize, without falling into a bottomless pit of language war. Rust is more complicated than Go, and it's that way for a reason: you can readily use Rust in problem domains that don't admit Go.
    - tialaramex 4y ago
      It does feel like it ought to be true - like you said, there's a garbage collector, surely it'd be easier? But alas, Go's quest to avoid being clever often means that when the simplest thing would be too clever that must be avoided. If you are implementing Go this is presumably a great convenience, but I'm not implementing Go, I was just trying to write software. Rust and Go agree that 1 == 1 and 5.26 == 5.26 and "New York" == "New York", but then Go wimps out. Rust has no problem if we should like to use this equality operator on arrays of integers, or slices of booleans, or for that matter HashMaps of HashSets of Vecs of Strings, but that's all too Clever for Go, so in Go we must use extra functions like reflect.DeepEqual. Rust and Go both agree there's fundamentally only one loop. But, they disagree on what that fundamental loop is. Rust's fundamental loop is named "loop". It just loops, forever, it's a loop. Go's idea of a fundamental loop is a variation on C's for loop it uh, well it has two statements, plus a boolean expression, the expression is tested before each iteration and the first statement happens once, but the other statement happens after each subsequent iteration. That... doesn't seem simpler. I'm not sure what their excuse was here, is an infinite loop too Clever ? There are a few more like this. Unsafe Rust is definitely way more complicated, but one of the less obvious benefits of that keyword is that it tells beginners what they don't need to know about. Ah, this is marked unsafe, I'm a beginner, no need to explore that yet. Probably you can argue that the need to teach 'lifetimes undoes all this benefit and that's still safe Rust. It's a position I don't have hard data to refute, just my personal experience, for whatever that's worth.
oogali 4y ago
If you're just looking for field names (keys), what's wrong with map[string]interface{}? Maybe I'm missing some key context, but I've never reached for reflection in the scenario you've described.

tptacek 4y ago

I'm not interested in the language war. It's just the case that Rust is both more difficult to learn --- especially if you've never worked in an unmanaged runtime before --- and more difficult to write. Which language is "better" is undecidable.

yumraj 4y ago
Harder than C++? Harder to use than C? Above is a question, not a snark. I like learning languages and haven’t dabbled in Rust so am curious.
- tptacek 4y ago
  C++ vs. Rust is a tricky question. C++ is easier to write in, but it's harder to get programs working in it. Rust is harder to write, but it's much more likely that your first execution is going to do something useful. But they're of comparable complexity.
  - elcritch 4y ago
    Second this. Rust also follows some habits of C++ like verbose syntax and accidental complexity. There was an article recently where a Rust port of a C++ application ended up being comparable in lines of code.
- sn9 4y ago
  There's a sense in which people are saying it's easier to learn other languages than Rust because it's easier to get to code that compiles so you can start building new features. There's a different sense that I feel is being overlooked by those people in that the problems you run into with Rust are frequently actual flaws or bugs in your code, and the compiler shouldn't be thought of an adversary blocking your way to feature development but a teacher showing you the things you're overlooking. So once you put in the upfront cost of learning how to write Rust that compiles, you get code that's much more maintainable, correct, and easy to refactor. So for someone that likes learning languages, I'd say choosing to learn Rust is a great choice and will teach you things you can take with you to other languages.
tialaramex 4y ago
I'm sure this is true for some people, but I found in Go their "Don't Be Clever" just drove me nuts. There's a thin layer where it's fine, and then once you get beyond that your options are Be Clever (Nope, Go tells you not to even try) or Give Up, I gave up. Whereas in Rust I was able to keep going. Sometimes, when I dug down I reached something truly enlightening like the implementation of core::mem::drop -- pub fn drop<T>(_x: T) { } [ Yes I said implementation, that's not a typo, that's the actual implementation. ] Sometimes, it's all fucking turtles, e.g. Aria's famous "Pre-pooping your pants" essay and her "Tower of Weakenings". There's bad news, but if you don't like that we also have more and different bad news. And sometimes it was a voyage of discovery, but it was an interesting voyage, I learned much and I felt invigorated and encouraged. For example why C++ std::vector's reserve is not Rust's Vec::reserve but Vec::reserve_exact or why Rust's functions each have unique unnameable types, or how MaybeUninit actually works.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I have no trouble believing that there are programmers who enjoy writing Rust more than they enjoy Go, and many of those programmers are probably faster when they're not being irritated by the language they're working in. But I simply don't buy arguments that Rust is easier to pick up, or even as easy. Go is a garbage collected, managed runtime. Rust is in some ways harder to write than C++. The very last thing I'm here to do is to advocate for Go over Rust, or vice versa. But there are some basic facts about the languages we should be able to recognize, without falling into a bottomless pit of language war. Rust is more complicated than Go, and it's that way for a reason: you can readily use Rust in problem domains that don't admit Go.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    It does feel like it ought to be true - like you said, there's a garbage collector, surely it'd be easier? But alas, Go's quest to avoid being clever often means that when the simplest thing would be too clever that must be avoided. If you are implementing Go this is presumably a great convenience, but I'm not implementing Go, I was just trying to write software. Rust and Go agree that 1 == 1 and 5.26 == 5.26 and "New York" == "New York", but then Go wimps out. Rust has no problem if we should like to use this equality operator on arrays of integers, or slices of booleans, or for that matter HashMaps of HashSets of Vecs of Strings, but that's all too Clever for Go, so in Go we must use extra functions like reflect.DeepEqual. Rust and Go both agree there's fundamentally only one loop. But, they disagree on what that fundamental loop is. Rust's fundamental loop is named "loop". It just loops, forever, it's a loop. Go's idea of a fundamental loop is a variation on C's for loop it uh, well it has two statements, plus a boolean expression, the expression is tested before each iteration and the first statement happens once, but the other statement happens after each subsequent iteration. That... doesn't seem simpler. I'm not sure what their excuse was here, is an infinite loop too Clever ? There are a few more like this. Unsafe Rust is definitely way more complicated, but one of the less obvious benefits of that keyword is that it tells beginners what they don't need to know about. Ah, this is marked unsafe, I'm a beginner, no need to explore that yet. Probably you can argue that the need to teach 'lifetimes undoes all this benefit and that's still safe Rust. It's a position I don't have hard data to refute, just my personal experience, for whatever that's worth.

oogali 4y ago

If you're just looking for field names (keys), what's wrong with map[string]interface{}? Maybe I'm missing some key context, but I've never reached for reflection in the scenario you've described.