[jerf]

Put it this way: Each of the things mentioned in that post were errors that could just as easily have been made in Rust, and Rust would not necessarily have helped avoid. At best you can make a case for the errors being more explicit, but in my personal experience even that would be weak.

The last error in particular, using byte buffers instead of a streaming abstraction, is pervasive in programming. I don't know if Rust is necessarily any worse than Go's library environment for dealing with that problem but I doubt it's any better. By having io.Reader in the standard library from the beginning (and not because of any other particular virtue of the language, IMHO) it has had one of the best ecosystems for dealing with streams without having to manifest them as full bytes around [1].

It amounts to, the root problem is that they didn't have the problem they thought they have. Rust will blow the socks off the competition w.r.t. memory efficiency of lots of small objects, which is why it's so solid in the browser space. But that's not the problem they were having. Go's just fine where they seem to have ultimately ended up, stream processing things with transient per-object processing. Even if you do some allocation in the processing, the GC ends up not being a big deal because the runs end up scanning over not much memory not all that frequently. This is why Go is so popular in network servers. Could Rust do better? Yes. Absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt. But not enough to matter, in a lot of cases.

[1]: An expansion on that thought if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28368080

[tptacek]

I think the Rust and Go stories with buffers vs. readers is pretty comparable. They both have good support for readers, and to-good support for reading whole messages into slices or Vec<u8>'s.

[jerf]

Good to hear. I hope it's something all new languages have going forward, because like I mentioned in my extended post it's almost all about setting the tone correctly early in the standard library & culture, rather than any sort of "language feature" Go had.

As mostly-a-network engineer it's a major pet peeve of mine when I have to step back into some environment where everything works with strings. I can just feel the memory screaming.

[pjmlp]

You mean just like XML-RPC and JSON-RPC (sorry REST), work?

Because the best way to contribute to global warming is to waste CPU cycles serializing and deserializing data structures into XML and JSON, and parsing them as well.