[nessex]

Possibly, when working with big codebases I'm typically working on Kubernetes controllers in both Golang and Rust. That makes for extra slow golang compiles, and the rust incremental compiles are significantly quicker in comparison. Otherwise the codebases tend to be quite small, and for those golang full compiles (the only option?) and rust incremental compiles are similarly nearly instant.

It is absolutely apples to oranges, but if you just care about the everyday local workflow and ability to iterate and test, it's close enough most of the time to not be much of a problem in either case.

I'm sure this experience isn't guaranteed for all codebases, and it certainly helps that I make heavy use of crates, which would minimize the work required during incremental compilation. Though I'm not actively going out of my way to optimize for incremental compilation really, beyond the config linked above.

[coder543]

Kubernetes is, unfortunately, not typical Go code. It uses a Makefile, which is never encouraged in Go, and it has a bunch of custom build scripts managed by that Makefile. I was looking at the Kubernetes issue tracker for other reasons, and came across one ticket open right now that mentions "fix excessive `go list` use in build scripts causing extremely long build times", so they know their build times are awful compared to what they should be. They don't even use Go Modules in the main Kubernetes code base, relying instead on $GOPATH which has been soft deprecated for years now, and hard deprecated possibly by the end of this year.

Plus, Kubernetes is sitting at 5 million lines of Go code, by my count. Try compiling a 5 million LoC Rust code base... I won't wait around.

I would assume that a controller written in Rust bypasses all the complex legacy of the Kubernetes code base, and that's why it can compile faster. If someone made a similar project in Go[0] to write Kubernetes controllers in Go without depending on the mega-Kubernetes code base, I'm sure it would be incredibly faster at compiling than the Rust version.

Beyond that, I've heard that the Kubernetes codebase is internally just a nightmare of basically untyped `interface{}` stuff floating around everywhere, which would make the development experience subpar. I don't know how much this is exposed to custom controllers.

So, if Kubernetes is your only experience with Go... I'm sorry you've had to experience that. It's a product that people seem to agree is functional and works most of the time, but I can't remember hearing any positive experience from people working on it. From what I understand, it was originally prototyped in Java, and then hastily rewritten into Go before public release, and I'm sure that didn't help things.

[0]: conceptually, maybe something like this? https://github.com/ericchiang/k8s or an updated fork of it like this: https://github.com/karlmutch/k8s No idea how well either works, if at all.