alt Hacker NewsInteresting. It is semi-rare that I meet someone who knows both Rust and Go and prefers Go. Is it the velocity you get from coding in it?
I have a love/hate relationship with Go. I like that it lets me code ideas very fast, but my resulting product just feels brittle. In Rust I feel like my code is rock solid (with the exception of logic, which needs as much testing as any other lang) often without even testing, just by the comfort I get from lack of nil, pattern matching, etc.
I think this is kind of a telling observation, because the advantage to working in Go over Rust is not subtle: Go has full automatic memory management and Rust doesn't. Rust is safe, like Go is, but Rust isn't as automatic. Building anything in Rust requires me to make a series of decisions that Go doesn't ask me to make. Sometimes being able to make those decisions is useful, but usually it is not.
The joke I like to snark about in these kinds of comparisons is that I actually like computer science, and I like to be able to lay out a tree structure when it makes sense to do so, without consulting a very large book premised on how hard it is to write a doubly-linked list in Rust. The fun thing is landing that snark and seeing people respond "well, you shouldn't be freelancing your own mutable tree structures, it should be hard to work with trees", from people who apparently have no conception of a tree walk other than as a keyed lookup table implementation.
But, like, there are compensating niceties to writing things like compilers in Rust! Enums and match are really nice there too. Not so nice that I'd give up automated memory management to get them. But nice!
I'm an ex-C++/C programmer (I dropped out of C++ around the time Alexandrescu style was coming into vogue), if my background helps any.