[nivertech]

skip Golang, go straight for Rust

EDIT:

as my time for learning new programming languages is limited, I would invest it in learning Rust, rather than learning Golang or learning both of them.

IMO the only reason to learn Golang is if your already have a legacy Golang codebase or if you want to contribute to various open source projects written in Go, like for example Kubernetes (my first experience with Golang was trying to compile a patched Hashicorp project).

It's the same as suggesting to a front-end dev, skipping Backbone, Ember and Angular and going straight for React.

There are lots of overlapping technologies in our space and learning all of them is a huge time waste.

[dang]

Please don't post unsubstantive comments or do programming language flamewars here.

[F-0X]

> There are lots of overlapping technologies in our space and learning all of them is a huge time waste

I agree.

That's why I invested time into looking at Go over Rust.

Go will be the better choice for most programs most developers will write. Go 2 even more so. Rust is too complex, and for the applications where a garbage collector is acceptable (>99% of them) it isn't worth it.

[Buttons840]

Your opinion is fine, but you need to tell us why. A single sentence adds nothing to the discussion.

[olah_1]

I agree. I would guess the "why" is that Rust is capable of everything that Golang is capable of, except more and better. Not to mention that Rust has a very supportive community to help each other.

[onei]

After using Rust for about a year on the side, I get the feeling that it's not quite mature enough yet in some places. On the other hand, I also get the feeling that the development of the language itself has been measured and careful which could also be seen as a bit slow.

On the other hand, I hear good things about Go across lots of people I work with although I've yet to sit down and give it a meaningful try. But I also have concerns about the maturity of a language who has jumped to V2 in what seems like a relatively small amount of time.

I'm inclined to believe both languages have lots of promise and could easily be the future of software development, but I'd be hesitant to pick either for a project that needs to be maintainable for a long time in case the language changes too much and leaves you with technical debt.

[hu3]

> But I also have concerns about the maturity of a language who has jumped to V2 in what seems like a relatively small amount of time.

Where can I download Go v2? Latest is tagged 1.13beta1

Go authors stated multiple times that there are no plans for a Go 2 at the moment. They rather improve the language in small increments breaking as least as possible.

[cyphar]

> Go authors stated multiple times that there are no plans for a Go 2 at the moment.

There are plans for Go 2[1], Russ Cox has written blog posts and given talks about design improvements for Go which would go into a Go 2. There isn't a roadmap (yet) but this discussion has been going on for the past year or so[2]. They talk a bit about next steps in the most recent blog post about Go 1.13[3].

[1]: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Go2 [2]: https://blog.golang.org/go2draft [3]: https://blog.golang.org/go2-next-steps

[vorg]

They're talking about "Go 2" the brand, not Go 2.0 being a new major version having breaking changes to Go 1.x. There are no plans for a breaking-changes Go 2, only occasional additions to Go 1.x under an ongoing "Go 2" developer relations effort.

[hu3]

Clearly there's more to it otherwise Go and other languages would be a thing of the past.

This is really not a topic for language flamewars and it's even against HN guidelines. I don't understand why people need to scream rust in every other language post like if it was a religion.

[bsaul]

Devil’s advocate here : i think it’s due to the promise rust makes that borrow checkers prevent you from writing unsafe code or race conditions, as well as high level abstractions with zero performance cost.

That set of promises really would make any programmer go crazy i think, and become a zealot.

Rust is definitely on my todo list, i’m just waiting for the language to mature a little bit more, because some edges still seem a git rough. But i am extremely enthusiastic about it.

[hu3]

It's not free though. There's a hefty price to be paid in complexity. I am as "crazy" for Rust as I am for Ada.

I suspect that is one of the reasons why behemoths like Uber, Twitch.tv, Stripe and Walmart chose Go over Rust.

[Thaxll]

Rust doesn't prevent race condition.

[nivertech]

No language is a thing of the past, since there are lots of projects and codebases written in it. Hell, people still using PHP and Perl. But they are not the first choice for starting a new project.

What will happen is that with time no greenfield project will be started with Golang and it will gradually become a legacy language.

[hu3]

Vague statements like this contribute nothing to the conversation.

Specially when they go against data https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2019/

> Go - The most promising programming language. Go started out with a share of 8% in 2017 and now it has reached 18%. In addition, the biggest number of developers (13%) chose Go as a language they would like to adopt or migrate to.

And this https://research.hackerrank.com/developer-skills/2019

> Go is the language that developers want to learn the most in 2019

[sho]

Not really defending the vague statements of the person you're replying to, but I'd take those surveys with a giant grain of salt. There's just too much selection bias at work. I for one struggle to imagine how any company could ever induce me to take one of these surveys, and I doubt I'm that special a snowflake. 49% of devs have used python in the last 12 months? And 50% java? Huh? Who are these people?

Probably the best we can do is analyses such as github's [1], which doesn't rely on people responding to marketing emails to reach a conclusion - but I'd say even that is very far from the big picture. Most large IT organisations still run their version control, for example. Hell, I'm still coming across PHP and JS programmers in 2019 that don't use any source control. Professionals. At agencies. Yeah.

None of this is to rain on golang's parade - it's a solid language IMO, despite the hype around it encouraging many people to, again IMO, optimize prematurely. Just to remind that an output is only as good as its inputs.

[1] https://github.blog/2018-11-15-state-of-the-octoverse-top-pr...

[nivertech]

It's "vague", because it's a statement about the future.

Unfortunately I don't have data from the future, but I do have a good intuition about the future trends ;)

[j-pb]

Everything but being easy to learn, and having low complexity. Don't get me wrong, rust is an amazing alternative for C++, but golang is not targeted at that problem space. It's aimed at highly concurrent networked applications with a high feature turnover and large teams with varying seniority. In those areas development speed is more important than execution speed, and I'd take a few GC pauses over fighting the borrow checker any day. Plus rust ist still lacking a good concurrency story, which is spot on for golang.

[faitswulff]

I would disagree. Rust and Go occupy very different spaces. This is like saying "skip the car, take a rocket ship." Sure, Rust will go faster in some circumstances, but it's a hell of a commitment.

[olah_1]

>This is like saying "skip the car, take a rocket ship."

That's exactly what it is like saying. Sure, some people might not want a rocket ship. That's fine. But that is the logic behind "skip go, take rust".

[nivertech]

I think the main takeaway for me from watching the YC Startup School videos was that doing a unicorn-scale startup vs a small business initially takes about the same effort for the founders. So, why would you choose the latter then?

[olah_1]

Why would I choose a small business over a unicorn-scale startup? Can you explain why this question is relevant?

[lprd]

I've been learning Go these days and have enjoyed it quite a bit. Rust is also on the menu this year. Aside from the Rust book, do you have any suggestions on learning material?