At cost? … depends on what you’re charging me, and how much I’m getting
1) Loosely typed to get you what you want faster, but with some mistakes, and 2) Strongly typed that forces you to try harder, but ultimately better
I'm usually happier with the latter. I find I become far more frustrated when I try to write python than I do something like Rust just because I know when I write Python that I will have mistakes I'll have to fix in prod, vs when I write Rust I won't have those mistakes (although it'll take me longer to get something to prod)
- Sqlx is cool; it’s similar to sqlc but with proc macros. Unfortunately, it requires and connects to PostgreSQL… during compilation.
- The GIF crate works, but it’s kind of slow. It seems that image processing may be a little difficult to optimize safely. Also, alarmingly, I ran into a bug that broke the output in only in production builds… (only in higher opt levels.)
- Sometimes, the dependency trees start to look like npm. Understandably, the standard library for Rust is not quite as big as Go.
Go has a lot of great stuff in the ecosystem. There’s the standards library, with great crypto implementations, implementations of various common file formats and markup languages, etc. there’s a pretty good library for parsing raw packet capture, gVisor has a robust TCP stack and a mutex lock checker, there’s tons of linting tools, and golangci-lint ties a lot of them together, sqlc.dev and buf are useful for writing services, and there’s plenty of native Go client libraries for databases, queues, etc. whereas for Rust it seems you’re more likely to be stuck with C bindings, or occasionally worse.
It’s great that Rust is so good at integrating with C code; it may even be better for consuming C libraries than C. However, it is a damn shame that for a lot of stuff in production environments, you are still going to need to fall back to C today.
Rust feels like the perfect language to go nuts in and build the future. It has some issues (my big two are async being kind of stinky and no placement new) but by and large, nobody, even I, a big Go zealot, would deny that Rust feels like the future. If I had to pick a language for a project where I had unlimited time and budget to do it right, it’s Rust every single day.
That said… Today, at least for writing services and command line tools, Go feels like a good tradeoff for people with deadlines and decent standards. I use Go at work, and I have been doing so for almost a decade now. Do I spend time on problems that are wholly preventable by better language design? Absolutely. Does Go save me time by being simple as hell, having a rich ecosystem and compiling very quickly? Also yes.
I do hope to have more projects where I can make effective use of Rust. I have one I’ve been trying to get going for a while, where Rust’s attention to detail and robustness would be amazing to have, and it’s in an environment where Go would not work well. That said, it always proves to be at least a little challenging it seems.
For someone with such strong opinions, you seem to lack certain fundamental knowledge which I suggest you rectify ASAP as it will definitely improve your programming skill.
