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There are some influential fair comparisons of compiled languages, but for the most part my feeling is that people are moving from an extremely high level langu

There are some influential fair comparisons of compiled languages, but for the most part my feeling is that people are moving from an extremely high level language like Python or JS, and then going to Rust to get performance, when any single compiled language would be fine, and for 90% of them, Go would have been the right choice (on backend or web-enabled systems apps), there was just a hurdle to get to most other compiled languages. It's just Rust is somehow more accessible to them? Maybe it's that pointers and memory just was an inaccessible / overburdensom transition?

bombela 2y ago
Not sure how much it weighs on the balance in those types of decisions. But Rust has safe concurrency. That's probably quite a big boost of web server quality if anything else.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Go's concurrency is unsafe? Rust's concurrency is automatically safe? I am not saying you're wrong, I just don't find it any better than C++ concurrent code, you just have many different lock types that correspond to the borrow-checker's expectations, vs C++'s primitives / lock types. Channels are nicer, but that's doable easily in C++ and native to Go.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    > Go's concurrency is unsafe? Rust's concurrency is automatically safe? Yes and yes... Rust statically enforces that you don't have data races, i.e. it's not possible in Rust (without unsafe hacks) to forget to guard access to something with a mutex. In every other language this is enforced with code comments and programmer memory.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      As long as that something is in the process's own memory.
      - School-Cotton 2y ago
        Correct, rust doesn’t magically prevent all bugs. It just makes a large class of bugs harder to write.
        consteval 2y ago
        .. but most concurrency is done in distributed systems, where Rust provides little to no protection. Although making a Rust monolith would be great!
  - thinkharderdev 2y ago
    (Un)safe is a bit of an overloaded term but Rust's concurrency model is safe in the sense that it statically guarantees that you won't have data races. Trying to mutate the same memory location concurrently is a compile-time error. Neither C++ nor Golang prevent you from doing this. Aside from that
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      With the caveat that those data races are related to in-process memory being accessed by threads. Which is quite good, but leaves out shared memory with other processes, or threads having data races with external resources, while corner cases they are quite common in distributed computing scenarios.
      - tialaramex 2y ago
        You've been really obsessed by this for a long time and I'd be interested to understand if there's some specific trigger, something weird you're doing where this seems to you like it's a data race, because I have never seen anywhere that I was like "oh, I guess this is a data race" when there's unsynchronized access across process boundaries.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Because it is touted as an universal truth "Fearless Concurrency" of how Rust beats all languages, when in reality it only applies in a very specific use case, that in the world of distributed systems it isn't even the main one we care about in regards to concurrent and parallel access to data. So its supremacy above anything else is kind of relative, and always left of out context.
        tialaramex 2y ago
        See I don't buy that it's not "the main one we care about". What kind of insane software is expecting Sequential Consistency for shared mutable data across processes? That's what I still don't have a clear picture of. I think what I've seen here is merely a race condition, which is just not a big deal. Humans can't reason about data races because they're contrary to our normal understanding of the world, but an ordinary race condition isn't like that. Earlier I saw there was the nice cheese at the grocery store, but I wasn't sure if they had fresh bread so... I kept walking, when I reached the bread aisle I bought bread and then I went back but nope, somebody else bought the last of the nice cheese. Oh well. Race condition.
School-Cotton 2y ago
Rust is the only mainstream language with an ergonomic modern type system and features like exhaustive matching on sum types (AFAIK... maybe I'm forgetting one). Yes things like OCaml and Haskell exist but they are much less mainstream than Rust. I think that's a big part of the appeal. In Go instead of having a value that can be one of two different types, you have to have two values one of which you set to the zero value. It feels prehistoric.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  That strikes me as an incredibly niche (and probably transient) strength! But I will remember that.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    It's not niche at all; it's extremely common to need this. Maybe I'm not explaining it well. For example, an idiomatic pattern in Go is to return two values, one of which is an error: func f() (SomeType, error) { // ... } In Rust you would return one value: fn f() -> anyhow::Result<SomeType> { // ... } In Go (and similar languages like C) nothing enforces that you actually set exactly one value, and nothing enforces that you actually handle the values that are returned. It's even worse if you need to add a variant, because then it's easy to make a mistake and not update some site that consumes it.
    - consteval 2y ago
      To be fair even Java solves this problem with checked exceptions. It forces you to handle them or pass them on. It's really just C++ and C# that have a bit of wild west error handling.
      - School-Cotton 2y ago
        My point has nothing specifically to do with error handling, that was just the first example that came to mind.
- 2y ago
timeon 2y ago
> It's just Rust is somehow more accessible to them? Going to lower level languages can be scary. What is 'fighting the borrow-checker' for some, may be 'guard rails' for others.

bombela 2y ago

Not sure how much it weighs on the balance in those types of decisions. But Rust has safe concurrency. That's probably quite a big boost of web server quality if anything else.

jvanderbot 2y ago
Go's concurrency is unsafe? Rust's concurrency is automatically safe? I am not saying you're wrong, I just don't find it any better than C++ concurrent code, you just have many different lock types that correspond to the borrow-checker's expectations, vs C++'s primitives / lock types. Channels are nicer, but that's doable easily in C++ and native to Go.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  > Go's concurrency is unsafe? Rust's concurrency is automatically safe? Yes and yes... Rust statically enforces that you don't have data races, i.e. it's not possible in Rust (without unsafe hacks) to forget to guard access to something with a mutex. In every other language this is enforced with code comments and programmer memory.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    As long as that something is in the process's own memory.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      Correct, rust doesn’t magically prevent all bugs. It just makes a large class of bugs harder to write.
      - consteval 2y ago
        .. but most concurrency is done in distributed systems, where Rust provides little to no protection. Although making a Rust monolith would be great!
- thinkharderdev 2y ago
  (Un)safe is a bit of an overloaded term but Rust's concurrency model is safe in the sense that it statically guarantees that you won't have data races. Trying to mutate the same memory location concurrently is a compile-time error. Neither C++ nor Golang prevent you from doing this. Aside from that
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    With the caveat that those data races are related to in-process memory being accessed by threads. Which is quite good, but leaves out shared memory with other processes, or threads having data races with external resources, while corner cases they are quite common in distributed computing scenarios.
    - tialaramex 2y ago
      You've been really obsessed by this for a long time and I'd be interested to understand if there's some specific trigger, something weird you're doing where this seems to you like it's a data race, because I have never seen anywhere that I was like "oh, I guess this is a data race" when there's unsynchronized access across process boundaries.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Because it is touted as an universal truth "Fearless Concurrency" of how Rust beats all languages, when in reality it only applies in a very specific use case, that in the world of distributed systems it isn't even the main one we care about in regards to concurrent and parallel access to data. So its supremacy above anything else is kind of relative, and always left of out context.
        tialaramex 2y ago
        See I don't buy that it's not "the main one we care about". What kind of insane software is expecting Sequential Consistency for shared mutable data across processes? That's what I still don't have a clear picture of. I think what I've seen here is merely a race condition, which is just not a big deal. Humans can't reason about data races because they're contrary to our normal understanding of the world, but an ordinary race condition isn't like that. Earlier I saw there was the nice cheese at the grocery store, but I wasn't sure if they had fresh bread so... I kept walking, when I reached the bread aisle I bought bread and then I went back but nope, somebody else bought the last of the nice cheese. Oh well. Race condition.

School-Cotton 2y ago

Rust is the only mainstream language with an ergonomic modern type system and features like exhaustive matching on sum types (AFAIK... maybe I'm forgetting one). Yes things like OCaml and Haskell exist but they are much less mainstream than Rust. I think that's a big part of the appeal. In Go instead of having a value that can be one of two different types, you have to have two values one of which you set to the zero value. It feels prehistoric.

jvanderbot 2y ago
That strikes me as an incredibly niche (and probably transient) strength! But I will remember that.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  It's not niche at all; it's extremely common to need this. Maybe I'm not explaining it well. For example, an idiomatic pattern in Go is to return two values, one of which is an error: func f() (SomeType, error) { // ... } In Rust you would return one value: fn f() -> anyhow::Result<SomeType> { // ... } In Go (and similar languages like C) nothing enforces that you actually set exactly one value, and nothing enforces that you actually handle the values that are returned. It's even worse if you need to add a variant, because then it's easy to make a mistake and not update some site that consumes it.
  - consteval 2y ago
    To be fair even Java solves this problem with checked exceptions. It forces you to handle them or pass them on. It's really just C++ and C# that have a bit of wild west error handling.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      My point has nothing specifically to do with error handling, that was just the first example that came to mind.
2y ago

timeon 2y ago

> It's just Rust is somehow more accessible to them? Going to lower level languages can be scary. What is 'fighting the borrow-checker' for some, may be 'guard rails' for others.