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This was a really good summary of what Rust feels like in my opinion. I’m still a beginner myself but I recognize what this article is saying very much.

The hacker news comments are as usual very good too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40172033

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    5 months ago

    IDK, I wrote Go for years (from 1.0 up to 1.16 or so) and just got tired of all the footguns. So I write in Python for things that don’t need to be fast, and Rust for things that do.

    Some criticisms of Go:

    • minimal protection for concurrent memory writes, and no protection for reads - big article about data races - these are largely caught by the Rust compiler in safe code
    • mediocre scope guards - it just has defer(), which is nice, but I much prefer Rust’s Mutex<T> to Go’s defer m.Unlock()
    • nil instead of monadic Result - even worse, (*int)(nil) == nil but interface{}((*int)(nil)) != nil - so checking for nil isn’t even always what you expect

    Each of these has bitten me and cost me hours of debugging each time it happens, and it usually only happens in production or under heavy internal testing before a release.

    I went into Go expecting it to deliver more than it does, probably because of the marketing. I thought it had safe concurrency, but it really just has memory safety (i.e. it’ll panic() instead of accessing invalid memory, but doesn’t protect against wrong but not invalid memory access). Each time I learned something odd about it, I just gave it a pass because goroutines are so nice (they still are), but after almost 10 years of writing in Go, I’ve decided it’s just not worth it.

    Yes, Rust has a bit of friction with the compiler, but that’s getting better with every release, and I can attest that after working with it for a few weeks, you learn to write code that avoids compiler fails more often than not. I use it for most of my personal projects (currently writing a p2p app with lots of async code), and it’s a great tool. I still use Python for scripts and one-off projects (and my day job, which has lots of microservices), but Rust is my favorite.

    Go is nice, provided you strictly follow conventions, but I don’t think it works as well for larger projects, because you will run into those footguns. Maybe it won’t be you, but someone in your team will do something stupid and you’ll spend hours or maybe days debugging it.