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by vitalus 3642 days ago
Why not Go? Checks the boxes of "performant" and "safe" while remaining developer friendly compared to Rust
4 comments

You can just as easily ask, why not any other language, for the exact same reason.

But since you asked about Go, here are the 3 reasons that I would not pick Go:

1) no generics means less code reuse, which mean more testing of more code (potential runtime issues)

2) allowance of Null, means potential NPE/seg-faults (runtime issue)

3) non-type safe, inconsistent error handling (another runtime issue)

Go is a fine language, like many others, but it's not the same as Rust, and doesn't offer the same features (like no runtime/GC), which means it's not as flexible in its usage. But, I will grant you that Go is "easier" to write code in.

Anyway, there will be and are many great programs written in Go, as there have been in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml, Ruby, JS, etc. To each there own. Mine is Rust today, was Java before that, C++ before that, C before that, and Basic before that.

Sure, it just felt like a more natural fit than other languages given the criteria which is why I called it out specifically

Thanks for your mention of additional runtime safety, it isn't something I had considered

Oh connection pooling is handled automatically by the standard library ...jk not really, it leaks sometimes ... and ...down ...goes ...my ...production database. 2 weeks ago.
I'm not a fan of Go, but the connection pooling in the standard library doesn't leak. You're just not closing the Rows object if you encounter an error. It automatically closes if you fully iterate through it. But if you stop part way, you have to manually close it or the connection will not be returned to the pool.
Yeah I don't have the code or docs in front of me but I think it was calling db.Query().Scan(&thing) and forgetting to close the row returned by .Query(). I was also using some edgier parts of the sql package without fully understanding a lot it, so I exposed myself quite a bit.

Go is a small language but it's a language with roots in C that many people (myself included) don't understand that well. It's deceptively easy, kind of like picking up Elixir because Ruby without understanding Erlang. Lots of paper cuts.

Lack of generics is extremely developer hostile.
The article helpfully answers that question for you. It's entirely about features unique to Rust.
I actually saw very few unique features of Rust mentioned in the article which is why I was looking to contrast it at a high level to another language which met the criteria the author laid out while avoiding a mentioned drawback...I would hardly consider "it compiles to native" and "measured and thoughtful standard library" to be features unique to the language, though no doubt important!
The sophisticated type checker, the borrow checker, and the LLVM backend were all cited in the article and are all things Rust has that Go doesn't.