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by pclmulqdq 993 days ago
Go is a great replacement for Python as a web backend language (which Python really is not). I'm not sold on Rust as a web backend language, though: It ends up being a little too hard to work with (hello `async`) in that application, and you need to import a lot of 3rd party dependencies that are very opinionated. That stuff and the complexities of working with the borrow checker and async adds a lot of complexity to your large, long-running applications that you don't have to manage in Go.

I think Rust is a fantastic systems language that is misapplied to the web. I think Python was a fantastic scripting language that is misapplied to the web, too, so you can put that in context.
1 comments
blindseer 993 days ago
I agree that Go's web backend features make it fun to prototype an application. But the moment I want to do anything more complicated, then I'm not sure.

I counted the number of lines in my work projects, and I have $WORK projects that are 100k lines of code. Maintaining that in Go would seem like a nightmare to me, but in Rust that is so much nicer. My personal projects range from 10k - 35k and in all of those I much prefer the ones where I'm writing and maintaining Rust vs Go when it comes to similar complexity.

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pclmulqdq 993 days ago
It sounds like you have a strong personal preference for Rust, which is fine. I'm pretty sure nobody loves Go as much as many people love Rust.

Even 100k LOC is pretty small for a software project, and likely doesn't need more than a few engineers. The advantage of the simplicity of Go shows up when you have to coordinate across >100 people, many of which are kind of mediocre, and you need all of them to ship features. If everyone in the world were a genius who is obsessed with writing clean code, Rust would be a fantastic language to work in at that scale, but they are not.

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blindseer 993 days ago
For clarification, these are 100k LOC projects where I'm the only software engineer. I've worked on larger projects in C++ with other engineers, and would absolutely continue to prefer Rust as the size of the codebase increases. I guess my point is that Rust scales in a way that few languages do. Go comes close though :)
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