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9rx • 01/21/2025 • 1 reply • view on HN

As stated before, the documentation in both languages was already consulted. It did not clear up how Rust is any different than Go in this regard. Consider a simple example from the Go documentation: Support for numeric underscores, which was not a part of the original language and later included in a 'new edition' of Go.

   i := 10_000_000
Using the 1.13 or later version of the gc compiler, if your go.mod specifies anything after 1.12 the above compiles fine. But if go.mod asserts go 1.12 or earlier, you will get a compiler error from the above code as the compiler reverts to 1.12 or earlier behaviour based on the version directive. That sounds exactly like what you described! And, like I said before, Rust's documentation too echoes to my read that editions accomplish basically the same thing and exist for the same reason Go version directives exist.

But the earlier commenter indicated that they are very different. So, unfortunately, you have again failed to break the cycle. We need something dumbed down for us regular people, not something directed at those who walk, talk, and sleep Rust.

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tubthumper8 • 01/21/2025

Sorry to have disappointed you. I don't walk, talk, or sleep either Rust or Go, but was trying to provide some resources to help in case you hadn't seen them yet.

One difference I noticed in the docs is in the Go Reference it says the "go" line of the "go.mod" has to be greater than or equal to the go line of all that modules dependencies, if the go line is 1.21 or higher, so a module for 1.21 can't depend on a module for 1.22 [1]

That restriction doesn't apply for Rust, a library using the 2015 edition can use a dependency that uses the 2018 edition, for example.

That's just one difference I noticed in the implementation. The goals seem very similar if not the same

[1] https://go.dev/doc/modules/gomod-ref#go

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