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When you first look at go, you might think, "gee, this language sucks. What is this? A compiled language with pointers, structs, that's not object oriented? And

When you first look at go, you might think, "gee, this language sucks. What is this? A compiled language with pointers, structs, that's not object oriented? And it has garbage collection? WTF. Okay, so this is meant to replace C/C++?" Nope. Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. Go is a langauge for people somewhat comfortable in low level langauges that want to high level things in a somewhat performant way. The older alternative is probably python. Rust is a language for people moderately comfortable in low level languages that want to do moderately low level things in a complex way. The older alternative is C++. C is a language for people very comfortable in low level langauges that want to do very low level things. The older alternative is assembly.

danieldk 11y ago
Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. I disagree. I think in many (but not all) use cases, Go and Rust are direct competitors. However, they embody a different philosophy. It's New Jersey (worse is better) vs. MIT style all over again. One can read Gabriel's[1] descriptions of both styles and they map exactly to Go and Rust. Given Go's heritage this is, of course, not surprising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  I agree that their philosophies are very different, but I still hold that their use cases do not align so much. For me at least, go has mostly taken the role that scripting languages sit in. I surely wouldn't want to write scripts in rust. What are some of the use cases that you think they share?
mimighost 11y ago
Agree. Go is made for web/distributed programming: builtin concurrency, battery-included library with great support for http utils, including a production-ready server and other stuff like RPC. And the distribution is just so easy. For a Pythoner, Go almost solves all my pain points for python, notably the lack of support for real multi-threading so that for long running task we have to turn into processes based 3rd party library like celery/rq with a message queue as intermediate layer, while comes with a relative familiar favor of syntax. Go is a pragmatic minimalist language, with limited but cohesive set of features that stays at its core. I don't know rust very well, but from what I gather from HN, looks like that it aims to be a more comprehensive solution rather than 'opinionated' one in case of Go.

danieldk 11y ago

Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. I disagree. I think in many (but not all) use cases, Go and Rust are direct competitors. However, they embody a different philosophy. It's New Jersey (worse is better) vs. MIT style all over again. One can read Gabriel's[1] descriptions of both styles and they map exactly to Go and Rust. Given Go's heritage this is, of course, not surprising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

nickysielicki 11y ago
I agree that their philosophies are very different, but I still hold that their use cases do not align so much. For me at least, go has mostly taken the role that scripting languages sit in. I surely wouldn't want to write scripts in rust. What are some of the use cases that you think they share?

mimighost 11y ago

Agree. Go is made for web/distributed programming: builtin concurrency, battery-included library with great support for http utils, including a production-ready server and other stuff like RPC. And the distribution is just so easy. For a Pythoner, Go almost solves all my pain points for python, notably the lack of support for real multi-threading so that for long running task we have to turn into processes based 3rd party library like celery/rq with a message queue as intermediate layer, while comes with a relative familiar favor of syntax. Go is a pragmatic minimalist language, with limited but cohesive set of features that stays at its core. I don't know rust very well, but from what I gather from HN, looks like that it aims to be a more comprehensive solution rather than 'opinionated' one in case of Go.