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by rfiat 1471 days ago
I appreciate your comment. My intention wasn't "Go is dissimilar because it's bad and Rust is good" but I can see why you'd think that. I'll attempt to clarify.

The reason I like and recommend Rust is the number of decisions it gets right which are completely orthogonal to the borrow checker. It's clear that a lot of thought was put into the unexciting parts of the language. That's why I like using it even though I don't particularly need the borrow checker and I'd be happy with GC. Some examples off the top of my head:

  - Expression-oriented nature makes code easy to write and nice to read
  - Compilation errors are as clear and helpful as possible
  - Comprehensive yet skimmable API documentation
In short, Rust is a nice language outside of the borrow checker.

A lot of the things which strike me as nice about Rust can't be said about Go. For that reason I think Go is a surprising suggestion for someone who likes Rust but doesn't care about ownership and lifetimes.

There are a number of minor but valid frustrations I encounter when writing Go which are completely orthogonal to the brief of "C but with GC and easy concurrency". I'd understand if these problems were a result of the language's goals but often they seem to exist for no particular reason. In that regard I think Go is quite dissimilar to Rust.

I hope that explains my viewpoint more clearly :)

1 comments

You’re comment make your point very well. Honestly, so did the first comment. Sometimes I find myself so tired of just lurking and reading HN that I just text dump some comment onto a totally valid parent comment.