Why Rust and Not Go: A Rebuttal

Really who cares?<p>Pick a language. They are both fine. Both will probably solve whatever problem you have without too many issues. Arguing over which one you should use its probably pointless 99% of the time.<p>I wish I had a link to the twitter exchange between both accounts where the answer they both agreed with was learn both, and lets have this conversation in a week. It feels 100% relevant here.

Not sure how good the original article is, but this is a poor rant.<p>And I very much dislike Go as a language.

&gt; &gt; The Go compiler is fast.<p>&gt; Ah crap, not that shit again.<p>&gt; The whole point is &quot;compiler is fast, tests run faster&quot;. Well, what if I said the compiler would catch bugs before the tests? That would be even faster, &#x27;cause then you can focus your tests on system behaviour, which is way more important than function behaviour or class&#x2F;structure&#x2F;module behaviour.<p>No.<p>A fast compiler is not only good for unit tests. And even when it comes to unit tests, it is not at all idiomatic Rust to omit them; on the contrary, unit test support is built into the language!<p>Rust having a slow compiler is a serious downside. The language has many upsides that can hopefully make up for it, depending on your priorities, but that doesn&#x27;t make compilation speed a non-issue.<p>That said, the compiler is significantly faster than it used to be and hopefully will continue to improve as time goes on.

I don&#x27;t understand how these 2 languages always get into these comparisons.<p>They are mostly aimed for different audiences and different purposes.

They&#x27;re just fundamentally for different things. For most classes of problems where the distinct features of one or the other would make any difference, if you&#x27;re choosing between Rust and Go, then you may consider that you might not entirely understand either your problem and&#x2F;or why either of these should be considered as part of a solution.<p>We chose Rust for a bunch of reasons related to enabling high-assurance software development with better ergonomics &amp; efficiency than attempting to do the same with C and bolting a bunch of disjointed augmentations onto either it or its toolchain.<p>Substructural type system + HM type system + ease of integration into embedded targets is fantastic for the platform we&#x27;re building and the markets we&#x27;re addressing. Using Go would make no sense at all for us, but may be perfect for a use case where the same kinds of guarantees &amp; assurances aren&#x27;t necessary.

&gt; &gt; As I already mentioned, Go was created to solve Google problems, and Google problems are definitely enterprise-scale problems.<p>&gt; You know who has Google problems? GOOGLE! You know who else has Google problems? NO ONE!<p>That&#x27;s true, but guess what, Google still uses C++ and Java for the vast majority of its critical infrastructure. So even at Google, C++ and Java reign supreme at handling &quot;Google scale&quot;. And it&#x27;s not surprising really, the maturity, performance, tooling, etc. available for Java and C++ are far superior to what golang has to offer. Not to mention both being far better languages than golang (even with how complex C++ is). golang is a weak language not suited for modeling complex domains.<p>Secondly, golang was developed by some employees at Google, not Google itself. And if it weren&#x27;t for the brand name behind it, it would have gone nowhere.

&gt; Honestly, I haven&#x27;t seen -- even with Rust -- something as dead simple as Flask<p>What about warp? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seanmonstar&#x2F;warp&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;seanmonstar&#x2F;warp&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;README.md</a>

I don&#x27;t like the aesthetics of rust as a language, and I don&#x27;t like the behavior of certain members of the rust community who vacillate between overzealous evangelism and dismissive rudeness.

As far as my understanding goes, I see this kind of comparisons as a &quot;Please-consider-to&quot; list to the language teams.<p>I&#x27;m a heavy Go user and light Rust user. I enjoy them both, and they gives me different set of advantages in return.<p>Please, don&#x27;t use&#x2F;treat comparisons as an attack, make it &quot;So-this-can-help-me-do-that&quot;.

I totally see what the author of this post is saying, and I agree with most...But, that original post wasn’t half bad. It was entertaining and well written. I frankly don’t think anyone took it for anything other than an opinion piece.