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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.

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[–] firelizzard 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I’d have to be living under a particularly large rock to be unaware of that. “It’s memory safe” isn’t that big of a deal to me. Even building concurrent systems, memory safety has never been a significant issue for me with Go.

[–] Lmaydev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Go is memory safe due to its garbage collection. Which adds a decent overhead generally.

Rusts memory safety is enforced at compile time and therefore has zero cost at runtime.

For a system level language this can be really important.

[–] firelizzard 1 points 1 year ago

In my book, "memory safety" also means avoiding data races. AFAIK Rust prevents most or all races by enforcing ownership and lifetime of pointers.

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

i think go is also considered memory safe due to the garbage collector