Programming

17501 readers

39 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

Why should I use rust (as a Go enthusiast)? (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago by firelizzard to c/programming

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not hating on Rust. I am honestly looking for reasons why I should learn and use Rust. Currently, I am a Go developer. I haven’t touched any other language for years, except JavaScript for occasional front end work and other languages for OSS contributions.

After working with almost every mainstream language over the years and flitting between them on a whim, I have fallen in love with Go. It feels like ‘home’ to me - it’s comfortable and I enjoy working with it and I have little motivation to use anything else. I rage every time I get stuck working with JavaScript because dependency management is pure hell when dealing with the intersection of packages and browsers - by contrast, dependency management is a breeze with Go modules. I’ll grant that it can suck when using private packages, but I everything I work on is open.

Rust is intriguing. Controlling the lifecycle of variables in detail appeals to me. I don’t mind garbage collectors but Rust’s approach seems far more elegant. The main issue for me is the syntax, specifically generic types, traits, and lifetimes. It looks just about as bad as C++'s template system, minus the latter’s awful compiler errors. After working almost exclusively with Go for years, reading it seems unnecessarily demanding. And IMO the only thing more important than readability is whether it works.

Why should I learn and use rust?

P.S.: I don’t care about political stuff like “Because Google sucks”. I see no evidence that Google is controlling the project. And I’m not interested in “Because Go sucks” opinions - it should be obvious that I disagree.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Every language is just a tool for the job. From what I understand Go is great for multithreaded web or backend applications. Now if you were a game developer you would most likely not be using Go as it is not industry standard and the support just isn’t there. Rust also intrigued me but as my current job is windows only I mostly write code in C# or Powershell.

What I do like about Rust are things like exhaustive matching and memory safety. I dislike cargo for the same reason I don’t like other languages with package management, supply chain security risks.

Pick the best tool for the job and use whatever language you enjoy the most.