Fitting analogy: If there's an article about McDonald's, people would always talk about Wendy's instead. No one would mention BurgerKing (C++), Subway (D), KFC, ...
The thing is, most discussions about Go are about adding features Rust has or making changes where Rust has something relevant to say.
I chose my analogy carefully. Coca-Cola tried to change its recipe to make it sweeter because they did studies and found people liked the taste of Pepsi more. So any discussion of changing Coke's flavor means Pepsi is highly relevant. But the converse is not necessarily true. Pepsi doesn't have any (recent) history of trying to match their flavor to Coke.
Maybe a better analogy is this: if Mercedes comes out with an electric car, you should expect to see Tesla in the discussions. But if Tesla comes out with a combustion engine, there's nothing particularly relevant about Mercedes in that discussion.
I'm sure that if there were discussions about adding structural typing or lightweight fibers to Rust, then Go would show up. But most of the discussions tend to be around adding generics or sum types to Go.
I wouldn’t say that I’m obsessed with Rust. However, it’s the sort of language I’ve wanted essentially since I started programming: a Haskell/OCaml-like language with the sheer performance and practicality of C++.
I’ve been a long-time user of Haskell, but I can safely say Rust has supplanted it almost entirely for me at this point. I never would have felt comfortable betting on Haskell in a commercial environment. Rust? Absolutely.
Can you expand on why you would not bet on Haskell for commercial work? What are those things that make Rust suitable for it but not Haskell in your opinion?
This is cool to hear. I've been interested in Haskell/OCaml to learn functional programming. Rust has other cool applications like WebAssembly too. I think I'll start learning it after I learn Clojure (trying to get into functional stuff first with Lisp).
Everybody that talks about rust is talking from a different perspective with different values. What makes rust different from other languages is the breadth of use cases for which rust is a candidate worth mentioning. That's not so much an obsession as it is an availability bias on your part. You're seeing different people talk about rust obsessively in different contexts and assuming that those same people talk about rust in all contexts.
If any of these features is of significant value to a programming use case, it is worth talking about rust:
* Speed
* Type safety
* Memory safety
* Memory determinism
* Latency
* RAII-based resource acquisition and destruction
* Concurrency correctness / safety
* Minimal runtime requirements
* Low level bit manipulation (eg. Cryptography, compression)
* Startup time
* Networking
This isn't exhaustive, but it gives a lot of different people in different domains working on different problems a reason to talk about the same language when comparing to their usual choices.
I don’t know if this explains the entirety of the phenomenon but I do think this post helped me understand at least a portion of the pervasive mention of rust in almost any programming conversation on HN, which makes the fact that happens slightly less frustrating.
You do realize that the lack of generics in go pushed a lot of go programmers towards rust, right? This feature of go is long overdue, and many people gave up on trying to get them implemented. The fact that they are now available has many programmers wondering if it is even worth switching back.
That is context for discussion, and yes, it is relevant. Directly relevant, in fact.
I get that. And that's a great discussion for the Rust community to have.
I wanted to hear what Go devs have to say about this latest iteration of the generics proposal. But to do that I have to wade through endless comments about type systems and Rust. Even on comments directly talking about this iteration and how to use it, every other reply starts with "In Rust..."
If implementing generics leads more of the Rust community back to Go, then from what I've seen here: no thanks. I have a feeling we'd see every conversation in every community forum start with "In Rust.."
> I get that. And that's a great discussion for the Rust community to have.
It's also a great discussion for the go community to have. The only problem here is that it's not a discussion you wanted to have. Should every discussion about go revolve around you and your wants?
If all you wanted was to hear what the go devs wanted to say, you could have clicked on the link and read it. Or could you possibly use the feature that was built for you: the [-] button to collapse a thread. Or maybe, just maybe, you could go to a place that is explicitly only about go, like /r/golang.
I'd be totally cool if it was this once, and actually interested.
But it's every freaking time. Every single time Go is mentioned, there's a ton of Rust folk commenting on how Rust does it (better).
Just for once, it'd be nice to have a comment thread discussing a Go-specific item, that has nothing to do with Rust, without talking about Rust.
And yeah, /r/golang is at least Go-focused. But it has its own problems too. Mostly PHP and JS folks learning Go and asking basic questions (which would be great if they didn't then reply to the answers with "but that's not how PHP/JS does it, why does Go do it so strangely?" and without reading any of the billion answers for that question already).
No I do not realize that at all. It's like saying "Lot of Americans will renounced their citizenship if Trump won" Yes a lot of people said that but I am not sure if there is data to conclusively say it happened in either case.
The only cases I know of are people moved to Rust to avoid GC pauses.