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by hu3 2540 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.

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.

Rust doesn't prevent race condition.
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.

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

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...

Fully agree, but I find surveys better than intuition.

On that matter you'll find plenty of Rust advocates referring to SO's survey stating it's the most loved language. They will however try to downplay surveys which report that Go's adoption is far superior and distancing.

With that said I find comparing Go and Rust an exercise in futility since the usecases rarely intersect.

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 ;)

The only way to know that you have previously had 'good intuitions' about the future would be if you recorded them (memory doesn't cut it) and then compared them with a subsequent events. Then you'd have to find a way of demonstrating that past intuitive success is an indicator of future intuitive success. Unless you've done all this, you only have an intuition that your intuition for future trends is good.

It's intuition all the way down.