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by blindseer 992 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.

1 comments

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.

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 :)