Slide with text: “Rust teams at Google are as productive as ones using Go, and more than twice as productive as teams using C++.”
In small print it says the data is collected over 2022 and 2023.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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I don't know. After writing rust for a while, and slowly putting programs together, I tried Go and I feel so relived I can just write what I want in 10 seconds instead of messing with lifetimes, borrow checker and other stuff I actually don't care about at all.
A more experienced colleague said that yes that is true, but Go can't guarantee your code is correct, so you will spend time fixing your code also in Go. Probably true.
Right, it's essentially the same argument as strong vs. weak typing. The weak typing proponents say JavaScript is best, because you can just write anything and you don't need to worry about all those pesky types getting in your way. The strong typing proponents (which if it's not obvious I am one of) point out that you can write incorrect code quickly in just about any language, but writing correct code is much harder, and the cost of correcting code increases the later the mistake is found. Errors that can't even be written are better than errors that are found at compile time which are better than errors that are reliably caught at runtime, which are all infinitely better than errors that only randomly appear under very specific circumstances.
That is why many people switched to using TypeScript for their websites instead of JavaScript, because even though you have to spend more time putting type annotations on everything, and at the end of the day at runtime TypeScript is literally just JavaScript, the errors it lets you find at compile time instead of runtime make the effort necessary to include those types worth it. Same thing applies with Rust vs. Go. Yes it requires more thinking up front when you're writing Rust code, and yes it might take you longer to write that code, but it's also going to be correct code you can be confident in and not have a bunch of ticking timebombs waiting in it that you don't even know about.
An extra 30 minutes spent having to think about a dozen lines of code, is infinitely preferable to spending 3 hours pouring over stack traces and single stepping debuggers to find that one subtle mistake you made.
I totally agree, though I think it's worth adding:
The advantages of static types is not just finding bugs (though it does do that quite well). It also massively helps with productivity because a) types are now documented, b) you can use code intelligence tools like renaming variables, go-to-definition, find-references, etc. (assuming you use a good editor/IDE).
In general stronger types are better but I do think there is a point at which the effort of getting the types right is too high to be worth the benefit. I would say Rust hasn't reached that point, but if you look at formal verification languages like Dafny, it's pretty clear that you wouldn't want to use that except in extreme circumstances. Similarly I think the ability to use an
anyordynamicescape hatch is quite useful, even if it should be used very sparingly.You are right. But I think similar secondary benefits also come from using the borrow checker. Rust developers, by necessity, try to avoid using circular references and prefer immutability where they can. Both of these are advantages because they tend to make for systems that are easier to understand and are easier to maintain.
Yeah I agree. The borrow checker definitely pushes you to write less buggy code.