[josephg]

Go has never been particularly popular on HN. It’s a bit on the nose, but lots of people here like to think of ourselves as clever (whether it’s true or not).

Go, philosophically, is a terrible language to show off in. It’s intentionally designed for every line to require as little brainpower to understand as possible. It’s not an aspirational language - unless you aspire to be able to hire lots of junior programmers and make sure they don’t cause too much trouble.

The lukewarm support go had here was because it was still new and trendy. Rust will lose its lustre in a decade or so too, and the tone will inevitably turn more negative. You can see the pattern slowly play itself out at the moment with docker.

[worik]

Mēh!

> The lukewarm support go had here was because it was still new and trendy. Rust will lose its lustre in a decade or so too, and the tone will inevitably turn more negative....

Are Rust and Go not the same age?

[josephg]

> Are Rust and Go not the same age?

Rust only really started to get traction after 1.0 landed in 2015. Even then, writing web services and things like that in rust has only really been ergonomic in the last few years as async/await has stabilized. Rust is still a pretty niche language, and its much easier to admire something from a distance.

Go hit 1.0 in 2012, but people started using it in production before even then.

[zozbot234]

I'd say the 2018 edition was even more relevant (and that was late 2018, in fact). Rust was very hard to use prior to non-lexical lifetimes. So the real mass popularity of Rust is very recent.

Also why it's a bit silly to compare Rust to any other language (just pick your favorite: Go, C++, Java/C#, Python/Ruby, Haskell/Elixir, Javascript/TypeScript etc. and expect it to be just as popular. There's a whole lot of legacy projects written in older languages and they have to be maintained, even though some stuff does get ported to Rust in the meantime.)