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Go vs Rust? Choose Go.

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Original source (matthias-endler.de)
Tags: golang go rust flame-war philosophy-vs-pragmatism language-wars matthias-endler.de
Clipped on: 2017-09-16

Backend Engineer at trivago. Likes just-in-time compilers and hot chocolate. About me.

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Go vs Rust? Choose Go.

Published on 15th of September 2017
Image (Asset 1/1) alt=Go is one of the most productive languages I've ever worked with. The mantra is: solve real problems today.

I don't think Go is an elegant language. Its biggest feature is simplicity. Go is not even a systems programming language. While it's great for writing microservices and tooling around backend infrastructure, I would not want to write a kernel or a memory allocator with it.

Rust in comparison is hard. It took me many months to become somewhat productive. You need to invest a serious amount of time to see any benefit. Rust is already a powerful language and it gets stronger every day. It feels much more like a "pragmatic Haskell" to me than a "safer C".

99% of the time, Go is "good enough" and that 1% where it isn't, you'll know. And then take a look at Rust, because the two languages complement each other pretty well.

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