[crubier]

> TS is a joke

I'll discuss facts

> tsc is the only compiler I've had to step through with a debugger multiple times.

99.9% of Typescript developers never ever had to do that. Sounds like a "you" problem

> No DS/ML researcher wants to deal with VM args just to use more than 1GB of memory. That alone would cause so much frustration.

You're talking about NodeJS, which is just one of the many JS engines. It's also 200% easier to start NodeJS with a flag to increase the (sane) default memory limit, as compared to the insanity of setting up a Python environment.

> Not to mention unpredictable generational GC.

Is Python GC better? Really? The good thing with Python is that the whole language is so slow that GC is just a drop in the bucket. On the other hand, Millions (Billions?) have been spent optimizing JS engines and it shows. Also: GIL.

> Or the crazy crap people do with the type system (what you call better other people call a mess).

I don't know what you're talking about, TypeScript go Brrr and I get magnificent Intellisense and subtle type checking, while MyPy and friends keeps crapping their pants

> At least Python has some semblance of runtime type safety.

No. And critically it has no semblance of comp time type safety either.

[winrid]

The Python GC is slow, but predictable. I've seen the Node runtime falls apart past like 8gb heap all the time, but I have python scripts that run just fine with a 32gb heap.

Requiring the max old space flag is already too much. It's annoying.

Python does indeed have some runtime type safety. Way more than any JS runtime I've used. And I've written way more Node/JS/TS than Python.

In terms of the compiler, Nah. The whole ecosystem stinks. I cannot wait to move my larger Node projects to Java or something else. Idk how much dev time people waste on arcane tsc or npm issues but the answer is "too high" regardless. At least esbuild is okay.

[bb88]

I spent a good chunk of last year learning go, and felt dumber for doing so. I feel like Rust is the way to go in 2023 and beyond -- particularly if the rustaceans can get past their own stupidity.

[winrid]

I haven't used go for some reason but it always looked nice. I like the simplicity, for some things. I know old C programmers trying to write web services in C (with hand rolled json...) and I wish I could get them using Go. :)

Rust is neat. I wrote a decent sized side project backend (weatherfy.com) in Rust, with sqlx, postgres, and axum. Shared cache was tough to figure out but everything else was easy.

The whole backend has like one lifetime annotation, so that wasn't too bad. Honestly, I'd use it again, but the compile times scare me.

[bb88]

There's a bunch of negatives I found. I'll gloss over them here.

- New libraries can't just be deployed to the OS, they must be compiled into the project.

- A check for thing==nil doesn't always work for all types of nil. Yes nil does not always equal nil.

- Panics aren't necessarily a bug. They could be a feature (?). Crashes are always a bug in C.

- Garbage collection is mandatory in go. C people are used to managing memory themselves like going for a walk. It's kinda natural.

- GC causes hard to debug performance issues. This was true in Java. And it's true in Golang.

- Golang channel primitives has bugs of their own with deadlocks and other interesting behaviors, whereas a lot of the threading issues in C are pretty well understood.

[lelanthran]

You cannot really compare Rust and Go.

Rust is for when you really need to perform manual memory management. If you don't need that, then a GC language is better.

If you're choosing manual memory management over GC, you better have a really good reason to do so or a really small application that you're writing.

[remkop22]

Literally the whole point of rust is to not do manual memory management and let a compiler handle that for you.

[lelanthran]

> Literally the whole point of rust is to not do manual memory management and let a compiler handle that for you.

Incorrect. The compiler forces you to handle memory properly. It doesn't, as far as I know, manage it for you.

The burden is on the programmer to do it correctly. The compiler stops the programmer from doing it incorrectly.

Compare with GC, where the programmer is freed from the burden of worrying about memory altogether.

[remkop22]

I would make a distinction between managing memory (malloc, free) and then subsequently handling said memory in a safe manner.

The first part Rust does for you.

The second part you'll indeed have to do yourself and the compiler will force you to do it safely.

[f33d5173]

>Also: GIL.

javascript is terminally single threaded, with the only solution being either multiprocessing and message passing, or cooperative multitasking style promises/async. This is not a situtation where javascript pulls ahead, as hard as python seems to try to fall behind.

[winrid]

and before you question my experience again, I have 100k+ LOC Node projects.

You admitted your opinion would be controversial. Guess what? It is. Hardly anyone wants to do ML in TS. No ML researcher <wants ? <to> | deal | with < type signatures > (like ? This)>>>>

[crubier]

Interesting that you say that, this was the top voted comment on a post recently about using typescript for ML stuff: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36007493

[robertlagrant]

> > At least Python has some semblance of runtime type safety.

> No.

I mean.

  >>> 1 + "1"
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'str'

[cellularmitosis]

> I'll discuss facts

> the insanity of

welp, so much for that.

[crubier]

Whoops ¯\_(ツ)_/¯