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

submitted 1 year ago by firelizzard to c/programming

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Go is a great language. I used it a few times when dealing with bugs in open source programs. And though I never used it besides that, I could spot and fix these easy issues fast.

Rust is not like that. The syntax is a little harder to read and a lot of widely used libraries use complex macros to ease their users lives.

But:
I cannot count the times rust has saved my ass.

Examples:
Sqlx checks my sql files against a local test-db and always errors, when my scripts miss parameters after changing the sql file.
I have to use a complicated mess of an API at work to get the data I need and I now use a 50-60 element enum that tells me exactly, what I got back from the API-calls.