4 Feb
2022
4 Feb
'22
1:38 p.m.
On 2/4/22, Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It feels like the tide has turned from Go to Rust. I
speak Go relatively
fluently but have never used Rust in anger. Do the august personages on
this
list have opinions about Rust? People who generally have tastes consonant
with mine tell me I'd like Rust.
Although a bit outdated, I stand by what I wrote about Go several (six?)
years ago: https://athornton.github.io/go-it-mostly-doesnt-suck
2010 Go != 2022 Go
I used to be a big proponent of Go back in 2010. The language
definitely felt fresh and minimal back then when Java and C++ were
dominant on the market. And it definitely felt like the authors of Go
wanted to replace them . It made sense in the Google environment, but
very soon people realized that you can't write everything in Go.
Garbage collector is cool but actually it prevents you from writing
kernel or performance critical code, e.g. games.
But Go became popular anyway. A lot of substandard PHP and New Age
programmers started using it and it showed. In the beginning the
humble authors of Go preferred minimal variable names and less than 80
char lines. In time all this turned into Java-like long, expressive
variable names and extremely long lines. I really hate lines longer
than 80 chars...in any language. They are really hard to focus as you
need to constantly move your eyes from left to right. The same
phenomenon happens with very wide browser windows.
And due to popular demand they started to add on to the language
features: modules, generics, etc.. The language still feels a lot
less bloated than C++, but IMHO plain old C just feels more natural
and minimal.
And because I still program on a lot of old retro systems today I
returned back to C. You can use C on pretty much everything -- from
8-bit machines to amd64. You can't say the same about Go.
And Rust? If Go was trying to reinvent C, Rust definitely feels like
it is trying to reinvent C++...
--Andy