The OP points out the wordyness of Go's error syntax. That's a good point. Rust started with the same problem, and added the "?" syntax, which just does a return with an error value on errors. Most Go error handling is exactly that, written out. Rust lacks a uniform error type. Rust has three main error systems (io::Error, thiserror, and anyhow), which is a pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls.
(There are a number of things which tend to be left out of new languages and are a pain to retrofit, because there will be nearly identical but incompatible versions. Constant types. Boolean types. Error types. Multidimensional array types. Vector and matrix types of size 2, 3, and 4 with their usual operations. If those are not standardized early, programs will spend much time fussing with multiple representations of the same thing. Except for error handling, these issues do not affect web dev much, but they are a huge pain for numerical work, graphics, and modeling, where standard operations are applied to arrays of numbers.)
Go has two main advantages for web services. First, goroutines, as the OP points out. Second, libraries, which the OP doesn't mention much. Go has libraries for most of the things a web service might need, and they are the ones Google uses internally. So they've survived in very heavily used environments. Even the obscure cases are heavily used. This is not true of Rust's crates, which are less mature and often don't have formal QA support.
anyhow explicitly isn't designed for what you are trying to do here. It's designed to be the last link in the chain (and complementary to thiserror, not in competition). If you are using anyhow any deeper than your top-level binary crate, you are likely to be in for an unpleasant time.
Now that we have agentic coding I just write everything in Rust and couldn’t be happier. The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers. Now that we have agentic coding I’m not sure Go’s value prop holds up anymore
My rust services have been nothing short of amazing from a performance and reliability perspective
I'm not sold on Rust being a great language to use with AI unless the reason to use it is a lot more than just Rust being fashionable.
Compared to Rust, Go as a language requires a lot more effort to review. You have to be on the lookout for basic gotchas like not checking if a pointer is nil, placing `defer` in the wrong place, using a result when err isn't nil, and so on. Plus, diffs are messier because unused variables are a compilation error, and _, err := can change into _, err = solely due to new lines above.
If the LLM gives you safe code you know there are entire classes of things you don't have to review for.
That said, I agree with you. My experience is that LLMs are great if you are highly competent in the domain in which you let them work. And it's probably easier to be competent in Go than in Rust.
Aah, I am sure the chickens of vibe coded origin, will never come to roost.
Rust has practically one error, it's the Error trait. The things you've listed are some common ways to use it, but you're entirely fine with just Box<dyn Error> (which is basically what anyhow::Error is) and similar.
An easy rule before you make a knowledge based choice is Thiserror for libraries, helping you create the standard library error types and Anyhow for applications, easy strings you bubble up.
Or just go with anyhow until you find a need for something else.
The minus side of Go is too simplistic GC. When latency spikes hit, there are little options to address them besides painful rewrite.
Yes but Rust has a lot more availability of libraries to do stuff as a result. Want to do anything ML or scientific? You at least have a route in Rust where you don’t with Go.
https://uptrace.dev/blog/golang-memory-arena
These are all tools. Java used to have this all the time, and we (ex-java programmer) had ways around this until the JVM improved.
Or having Cranelift as default backend.
pub async fn dataset_stats_handler(
Path(dataset_id): Path<String>,
Query(verbose): Query<bool>,
) -> impl IntoResponse {
...
}
.route("/datasets/{dataset_id}/stats", get(dataset_stats_handler))
Many other things to like: The absence of context.Context, the fact that handlers can just return the response data, etc.
What I don't like: Async.
type DatasetStatsQuery struct {
Verbose bool `form:"verbose"`
}
func DatasetStatsHandler(c *gin.Context) {
datasetID := c.Param("dataset_id")
var query DatasetStatsQuery
if err := c.ShouldBindQuery(&query); err != nil {
c.JSON(http.StatusBadRequest, gin.H{"error": err.Error()})
return
}
// query.Verbose == bool
}}
I would assume Axum returns a bad request error for you when query parsing fails, but if you do want more control over how the error is handled, you can change the parameter type to Result<Query<bool>, QueryRejection>, and the type system itself documents precisely what errors you can match against.[0]
[0]: https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/extract/rejection/enum.Quer...
“Anyhow” just allows you to conveniently say “some Error” if you don’t care to write out an API contract specifying types of errors your function might spit out.
If I care about the specific variants of error that a function can return, so I can do different things depending on what kind of error occurred, I'll read the docs and match. That's not really a "framework" thing; that's just a basic thing that anyone has to do in any language in order to consume an API. If I need to propagate the error, I'll do so (either directly, or by wrapping it in a variant of my own error type). I don't see how any of this is "framework"-y.
A crate's decision to use thiserror (or not) does not matter to me. If a crate exposes `anyhow::Error`, that's a lazy choice and bad API design, but still "works" and I generally don't need to care about it.
Or is there something else you meant when you said "error frameworks"?
Writing primarily applications, I couldn't tell you what error handling frameworks my dependencies are using: I literally don't know, and haven't needed to know in order to display, fail, or succeed.
EDIT to add: I use anyhow for this, so I should also add "add context to an error when I fall" to the list of things I do.
Though go certainly did a much better job than rust on the standard library front.
People always tout this as a huge reason for not wanting a too big std in Rust (or "too useful" either), but IMHO that's just talking about reaching theoretical optimals, while leaving the community for years without good guidance via providing a opinionated practical and pragmatic way of doing things. Which I find to be a very unhelpful stance for a tool such as a programming language.
If a design of some std package didn't pass the test of time, and a new iteration would be beneficial, the language can leave its original API version right there, and evolve with a v2, with an improved and better thought out API after learning from the mistakes of v1.
Prime example: "hey we found that math/rand had some flaws, so here is math/rand/v2". A practical solution, and zero dramas as a result of having rand be part of std.
Having too much external code, like npm or rust crates, seems like a nightmare for me.
The language design makes sense in the context of Oberon (1987), and Limbo (1995).
Now when there are so many options finally building on top of Standard ML, and Lisp heritage, having to settle with Go feels like a downgrade.
I code since 1986, if I wanted if boilerplate error handling, or having cost as the only mechanism to declare constant values, there have been plenty of options.
The entire point in Rust is that you wrap Error impls with other Error impls, or translate one impl into another using a match. I've found this is far more flexible and verifiable than most other languages, because if you craft your error types with enough rigor, you can basically have a complete semantic backtrace without the overhead of a real backtrace.
I use thiserror a lot to help with my impls. Notably, all it does is impl Display and Error. It's not a specific other paradigm because it basically compiles out, it's just a macro.
Anyhow is perhaps the closest one to another paradigm because it allows you to discard typed information in favor of just the string messages, but it still integrates well with Errors (and is one).
Generally speaking there has to be a mechanism for optional handling of return values, in Go you can ignore everything (ew), you can use placeholders `_`, or you can explicitly handle things - my preference.
If you say "Well in C you have to handle the returns - I am not across C enough to comment, but I will ask you - Does C actually force you, or does it allow you to say "ok I will put some variables in to catch the returns, but I will never actually use those variables" - because that's very much the same as Go with the placeholder approach
edit: I am told the following is possible in C
trySomething(); // Assumes that the author of trySomething has not annotated the function as a `nodiscard`
(void)trySomething(); // Casts the return(s) to void, telling the compiler to ignore the non-handling
int dummy = trySomething(); // assign to a variable that's never used again
I welcome correction
Ultimately, if you have to ask, the Rust vs. Go consideration boils down almost completely to "do you want a managed runtime or not". A generation of Rust programmers has convinced itself that "managed runtime" is bad, that not having one is an important feature. But that's obviously false: there are more programming domains where you want a managed runtime than ones where you don't.
That's not an argument for defaulting to Go in all those cases! There are plenty of subjective reasons to prefer Rust. I miss `match` when I write Go (I do not miss tokio and async Rust, though). They're both perfectly legitimate choices in virtually any case where you don't have to distort the problem space to fit them in (ie: trying to write a Go LKM would be a weird move).
The Rust vs. Go slapfight is a weird and cringe backwater of our field. Huge portions of the industry are happily building entire systems in Python or Node, and smirking at the weirdos arguing over which statically typed compiled language to use. Python vs. (Rust|Go) is a real question. Rust vs. Go isn't.
5% who write tools or other "infra" layer for the other 95% to work on top of maybe need that level of control over memory. It doesn't make any sense to me to sign up for that complexity unless you really really need it.
https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/
I'm not saying Rust is worse than Go. It obviously isn't. But this argument that Rust's memory management isn't more cognitively demanding than Go's memory management --- that isn't true.
If youre not writing the code yourself and vibing away which I think most people generally are despite the disdain around here then why would you not choose the "more performant language" (I know that isnt necessarily reality but it is a common perception).
Go's managed runtime is less valuable when the LLM is perfectly happy to slap a bunch of stuff together for you to and approximate it and doesn't complain at all when writing async rust despite some of the rough edges.
Most people are not doing that though. There's probably a good reason, and it applies to other languages too.
And as mentioned in other comments, Rust slow compilation can be detrimental to LLMs + fast iteration speed. And it's not just speed, Tauri takes 20GB of disk space to compile. It's bonkers. This is npm/js ecosystem all over again but slower.
Another reason to pick Go if you're leaning on LLMs is the standard library. Often you can do more work with fewer dependencies.
I'd rather leverage world class engineers paid by Google to maintain dependencies for me than try my luck with half a dozen of 0.x crates. Plus stdlib APIs can (and are) versioned just like third party dependencies.
Honestly using Go would have got us to the same point much quicker, with code that is much easier to review.
Go has no mmap(), import a 3rd party dependency for that and you'll get a segfault the very second you do a mistake.
Python has an mmap module which will catch many memory errors and present them as exception rather than causing a CVE.
Rust had a "vibey" community long before vibecoding. In particular, it's long been fairly non-serious about yolo importing a bunch of crates to solve things (since the standard lib is small) which is kinda the same problem as having all those things just vibecoded. Either way, most projects weren't reading all of that other code!
I wish TS had more of a runtime. The only thing I'm jealous of with regards to python is how seamlessly you can do JSON schema enforcement on HTTP endpoints. The Zod hoops are a constant source of irritation that only exists because the TS team is dogmatic.
It is illusions and lies all the way down the instant the compiler finishes its job.
You don't need a garbage collector which is perhaps half of the Go Runtime when you're using Rust.
You can also bolt on a few crates and get ~95% of what you'd get from Go's runtime.
Go has the best runtime in the world. I'll give it that.
But this is not the only reason...
That's not really something I care much about. My beefs with Go are 90% about the syntax of the language itself, and it's weak (compared to Rust) type system.
When it comes to a managed runtime, for most tasks, I generally don't care if my language has one or not. For some tasks I do, but there are not many of those tasks, and so this question is mostly irrelevant to me when deciding Go vs. Rust.
I don't really get where you're seeing that the predominant Go vs. Rust debate is about the runtime. IME it's the subjective stuff about the languages themselves, and their ecosystems and communities.
> The Rust vs. Go slapfight is a weird and cringe backwater of our field.
::shrug:: I dunno, I mostly stay out of it and just use Rust, and I'm happy and avoid the drama. I've written a little Go here and there, didn't really like it, and moved on.
I don't think it's about adoption levels; sure Go and Rust are tiny compared to JS/python/etc. It's emotional, not about who has the most users or who can even plausibly get there.
I agree with the general sentiment though. Rust also has a lot of crates that are stuck semi-unmaintained at some 0.x version, often with no better alternative.
That is to say 0.x doesn’t necessarily mean unmaintained, it can also mean “I don’t want to have to think about how to version APIs / make guarantees about APIs). Eg reqwest is very widely used and actively maintained yet is still at v0.13.
I think it's less that versioning is claimed to be easier with 0.x versions, and more that some people have got into their heads that 1.0 signals either "permanently stable" or "no new versions for several years" and they don't want to commit to that yet.
I do wish more crates would 1.0 (and then 2.0, etc).
Does any language, except like Java, exist with a standard library comprising matching that?
Also, keep in mind that Tauri itself is 14 crates, where each one shows up in your build tree.
https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/dev/Cargo.toml
And Ratatui is 6:
[0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html
Also argparse for Clap:
Edit: counts are fair, that’s still hundreds unaccounted
Nobody has "solved" it, and I don't think that there will ever be one (never say never, though, right?)
For Go we rely on developers of libraries to adhere to the semver versioning scheme accurately, and we cannot "pin" versions (a personal bugbear of mine)
There is a couple of workarounds - using SHAs not unlike the git commit hash to provide a pseudo version, and, vendoring (which is a cache of known dependencies - which brings with it cache management problems)
I had the misfortune of having to use Python with a virtual env on the weekend - it did not end well, and reminded me why I migrated away from Python.
Look at Perl (cpan) Java (maven, gradle) Ruby (gems) Go (dep, glide, vgo, modules) Rust (cargo) Node (npm, yarn, etc)
OSes too Redhat (yum, rpm, etc) Debian (apt) Ubuntu (snap - god why????)
And so on
What Nix and build tools need to agree on is a specification or protocol for "building a software dependency tree". Like, I should be able to say 'builder = cargo' in a Nix derivation and Cargo should be able to pick up everything it needs from the build environment. Alas, there is simply far too much tied up in nixpkg's stdenv for this to be viable, so we have magic stdenv builder behavior via hooks when a build tool is included in nativeBuildInputs.
And then you have httplib3 followed by httplib4.
In other words: I highly prefer the Rust approach.
It doesn't matter a lot whether I rely on the stdlib or another dependency to me.
It's a dependency after all.
People think just because it's the stdlib it's somehow better quality or better maintained, but these are orthogonal concepts.
In the end it depends solely on resources.
Sure, the stdlib may get more of these, but it may also grow fat and unmaintainable...
The c# guys at microsoft created an enormous stdlib, and the overwhelming majority of it is pretty good. The outliers being of course older stuff they've never really had time to upgrade. And they don't seem to be afraid to deprecate stuff, every major version brings a couple of minor breaking changes. But it all seems to work out just fine somehow
Would it make sense to continue using Go for the frontend and doing only the backend in Rust for your user case?
"This is the area where Go genuinely shines, and it’s worth being precise about why"
"the lack of GC pauses is a genuine selling point"
"Humans are genuinely bad at reasoning about memory"
"There are cases where the borrow checker is genuinely too strict"
And it’s a good contrast with ‘just fcking use Go’ article he linked.
Go article is much more human. I love that and would choose a human centered language and human centered culture over LLM-centered everything every time
I guess I am just old
It is, if I may say that, _genuinely_ hard to use LLM assist and not make the text look like LLM generated. Even when I write an email in gmail and it gives its suggestions to make the text better, each one individually makes perfect sense, but when I click a few of them, the whole email now looks like AI slop, so I would normally undo the changes, going back to my imperfect hand-written non-optimized version.
Take this paragraph as example:
> Go got generics in 1.18, and they’re useful, but the implementation has constraints (no methods with type parameters, GC shape stenciling, occasional surprising performance characteristics). Rust generics monomorphize, each instantiation produces specialized code with zero runtime cost. Combined with traits, this gives you real zero-cost abstractions.
Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. I would expect that kind of writing from very specialized books or papers, not from a blog post. Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
I actually prefer that style of writing! (When it's not AI-generated ofc.) And I also try to use it in my technical blog posts. I usually re-read my drafts asking myself: "Does the reader actually care about this? Is this sentence adding something or is it just fluff?"
And actually I feel like AI text usually produces more fluff, or anyway I notice it more, but I see how it can make the result "robotic and boring".
This is at the very least misleading, given that you can use unwrap.
Regarding error handling: will a parser error in the config return an error that includes the name of the file that’s failed to parse? That’s the kind of useful context that I add to errors in Go.
After writing web services, GUI apps and terminal apps professionally in Rust, I honestly struggle to see a use case for other languages.
I do have one nitpick though: Stating that data races are "caught at compile time" in Rust feels like it is overstating the case, at least a little. It sounds a bit like its implying Rust can also handle things like mutual lock starvation, or other concurrency issues. When that's simply not the case. I know "data race" is technically a formal term, with a decently narrow scope, yet I still think it could be a bit clearer about it.
I don't know why anyone uses spawn_blocking for CPU-bound tasks. It's clearly designed for blocking IO tasks. There's a reason why Erlang cordons them separately into Dirty CPU and Dirty IO schedulers.
> "Go got generics in 1.18 (March 2022), thirteen years after the language shipped. They are useful, but they feel tacked on, and in practice they have most of the downsides of a generic type system without delivering the upsides you’d expect coming from Rust, Haskell, or even modern C++."
The problems with Go generics have now largely been solved, haven't they? Is this comment from the author still applicable?
That is a signal that person is lacking purpose in their job or life.
I will say that many of the issues with Go in the article, especially re: nil handling are increasingly solved by thorough coding reviews with Codex. Better to not have the issue in the first place, sure, but these kinds of security bugs are becoming optional to developers who put in at least as much effort to review and understand code as they put into the initial design and execution.
Language data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding
The downside is that maybe it should fail sometimes when an idiomatic approach isn’t viable… instead it will implement something stupid that compiles and meets the request.
I have a huge list of things that I have in Rust that I would like in Go, but I don't have a single thing I am missing from Go in Rust.
I grow tired of golang "dumb it down" approach as I find it actually just shifts more and more work onto me.
Is anyone in a different position? What does Go have that rust does not?
These percentages are from the JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem Report 2024 on the question "Which programming languages have you used in the last 12 months?"[0].
I think a better datapoint would be the "Primary Programming Languages" in the 2025 report[1] where Rust sits at 4% and Go at 8%.
[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2024/#KeDHWJ
[1]: https://devecosystem-2025.jetbrains.com/tools-and-trends
Kind of funny when your Rust service runs on Kubernetes.
In the article, if you were to mention & follow them GetUser() in Go becomes user() in Rust[1], not get_user().
[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/naming.html#gette...
Over the past year I've been using AI to write small Rust tools for myself — I barely read the code, and honestly it just works.
But for serious projects I expect to maintain long-term, I still pick Go. Today I want code I can actually own and reason about myself.
Give it a year or two and I probably won't be writing code by hand at all. Once the AI owns the code anyway, that reason disappears — and at that point Rust's guarantees win. So I suspect I'll end up leaning Rust.
Maintenance is a big win for Go imho - that you can go to code you wrote a year or more ago - and jump right back into it, with little-to-no re-learning curve. The syntax is not providing cover for complexity bombs, and the tools keep the workflow simple and quick.
How is it with Rust ? Does one's own old code remain maintainable ?
cargo audit is not built-in, it is 3rd party. (The comparison table near the top isn't clear about that, and the following text stating more is built-in for Rust than for Go might be confusing. I would suggest adding an asterisk to mark built-ins in that table.)
cargo watch has been in "maintenance mode" for some time. The author of that suggests cargo bacon instead.
[1] https://github.com/polynya-dev/pg2iceberg
[2] https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2024/05/28/mostly-ds...
A lot of libs/packages in Go's stdlib also has this problem. They like to package everything in a very tight interface (very obvious example includes crypto/* and http), without exposing implementation detail to the end user.
Doing this of course has it's benefits, but if the feature provided by the stdlib slightly don't fit you needs, then you might have to write your own (potentially unsafe and/or less performant) one from zero.
Rust is great overall, but there's some oddities. For example their lib.rs / `mod` is very, very unintuitive, it felt overdesigned and unnecessarily complex (just see [their book]). I like what Go or Java did to their lib/package systems, it's much better that way.
[their book]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch07-05-separating-mod...
As you note it's just pain with no gain to properly hide them. Users can't readily work around bugs or extend functionality.
The biggest gripe I have with Go is the lack of *any* compile time check for mutex. Even C++ has extensions like ABSL_GUARDED_BY. For a language so proud on concurrency, it is strange not to have any guardrails.
If you have a mutex on a structure, linters such as are packaged into Goland will catch oversights quite effectively.
If you are using fancier concurrency structures, you should consider channels instead.
But generally I would agree that if you need to code parallel execution, channels are a good way to do it, because you can avoid race conditions if you share data only over channels. The biggest problem is that a lot of people don't understand, that channels with a buffer larger than 1 are a sign of problems in the architecture.
There is a type of parallel programming with workers for specific functions, that always leads to performance issues. The problem is you need to right-guess the distribution of work, when you have to define the amount of workers for a specific function. At least one go routine for one request is a much better approach than function-specific workers.
It feels like yesterday when every single project was moving to Go just because it was the new hype, that was until Rust was born.
We are already seeing projects dumping migration to Rust because the grass is not always greener on the other side.
We will be seeing this again, "Migrating from Rust to XYZ"
There was a signal to assist c++ to plain and simple C AI mass migration.
Removing any languages with ultra-complex syntax towards simple and plain C is always a good thing.
Now Rust is the new Go.
I find that very confusing.
For example, I can transmit the response to the client and then free the memory afterwards so they're not kept waiting.
But Go to Rust???
It does not make any sense.
Lmao so not an equivalent then? Standard glibc malloc, which is default in rust, will also similarly degrade albeit for different reasons.
hard_tabs = trueIf those are issues, I rather use C#/.NET than expose both developers and AI agents to a cognitive overload.
However, those are not big issues to me, and at least in the present day, Go seems to excel at the things it is supposed to: backend and microservices. Sure, you can find some small issues with Go if you are really nitpicking, but you can find bigger issues with other languages. Sure, Go is boring as f..k, but I don't care and the agents don't mind, they love Go. Most people prefer reading Go than reading Rust. Go allows a fast way to production and for many startups and small companies, that matters a lot.
I don't hate Rust, and even use it - for where I think it makes sense, but for backend and microservices, Go seems a better fit.
As always, this is an opinion, derived from my personal experience, take it with a grain of salt, your experience might be different.
It also skips entirely over debugging (delve vs gdb), IDE support, ecosystem (why the hell does Rust have N async runtimes?!), statically linking and so on.
A comparison between the performance of RLS / rust-analyzer (painfully slow) and gopls would be enough to kill the whole argument about developer happiness and productivity.
It even passes traits as a "reason to switch" to Rust - where in fact it would probably be a reason (IMHO) not to use it (together with lifetimes).
I think both languages are amazing, so a migration Go -> Rust (or Rust -> Go) makes no sense most of the time.
I've written code in both for a while now, so I know the pain and advantages of both.
For example, Go sucks at microcontroller stuff - in fact it's not even Go officially (see my presentation about porting "Go" to an ESP32-S3 [1]) - whereas Rust is amazing and even has a strong project behind (https://esp.rs) and amazing tooling (probe-rs & co).
What's also not addressed here is the Go ecosystem. The Go packages are one `go mod add` away (pkgs.go.dev) and the module owner guarantees v1 backwards compatibility for the whole lifetime of the module. This means that, no matter what happens, your dependencies will always be up-to-date with no migration struggle. This makes creating stuff for anything around the Kubernets ecosystem a breeze, you can literally import the types from another project and start your integration right away.
The most valuable part of the article seems the link to the opposite view (https://blainsmith.com/articles/just-fucking-use-go/). They're equally biased, but one is more straightforward than the other.
All in all, it's not a fair comparison and it's very biased (which is fair) - at the same time I think the idea behind the article is "wrong". If you find yourself migrating from Go to Rust (or vice versa), you're likely doing something wrong - and the performance gain is not the reason you're really doing it for.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18jWccV-F2FguZiB5gXLk...
>The other prior worth disclosing: I run a Rust consultancy; of course I’m biased!
This can easily be justified for many usecases, but for your vanilla crud app, do you really need Rust?
Per the article, you are getting 20-50% better more performance with Rust. Not worth it unless your team was already fluent in Rust. Now consider a scenario where your team uses AI exclusively to code, now you are spending more time and tokens waiting around to consume large rust builds. As far as I know this is an inherent property of Rust to have its safety guarantees.
I think Rust makes sense for a lot of cases, but for a small web service, overkill and unnecessary imho. If someone ported their crud app from Go to Rust I would question their priorities.
Again I am speaking more in terms of software engineering economics than anything else. Yes, I know in a perfect world Rust binaries are smaller, performance is better and code more “correct”, but the world is hardly perfect. People have to push code quickly, iterate quickly. Teams have churn, Rust, frankly is alien for many, etc.
A quick measurement on my web browser project with almost 600 dependencies:
- A clean "cargo check" was 31s
- An incremental "cargo check" with a meaningful change was 1.5s
Building is a little slower:
- A clean "cargo build" was 56.01s
- An incremental "cargo build" was 4s
But I find that LLMs are mostly calling "check" on Rust code.
---
That's on an Apple M1 Pro. The latest M4/M5 machines as ~twice as fast.
Can you clarify how you're spending tokens on waiting? My understanding is that the LLM isn't actually necessarily doing anything while a build runs. The whole process end to end may take longer for sure (ignoring things like the compiler catching more errors, that's really hard to factor in) but how does that correlate to more tokens?
This. rust emits more information both in its output and the syntax itself more complicated requires more tokens.
From what I've seen, Rust's strictness is actually a huge win for LLMs, as they get much better feedback on what's wrong with the code. Things like null checking that would be a runtime error in Go are implied by the types / evident in the syntax in Rust.
The big thing though is because builds are slower, you will end up waiting longer as tests are modified, rebuilt and run. This difference piles up fast.
Rust's compile time is longer because the compiler does much more. And therefore the binaries are often smaller, start and run faster than Go
This is Silicon Valley fantasy.
You know, shovels are useful, they are just more useful to the shovel manufacturer than the gold diggers.
But in the end it's a cool tool that made it way easier to dig holes and tend to your garden!