I could see migrating from C or C++ or Python to Rust, for various reasons, but for web back-end work Go is a good match. I write almost entirely in Rust, but the last time I had to do something web server side in Rust, I now wish I'd used Go.
The OP points out the wordyness of Go's error syntax. That's a good point. Rust started with the same problem, and added the "?" syntax, which just does a return with an error value on errors. Most Go error handling is exactly that, written out. Rust lacks a uniform error type. Rust has three main error systems (io::Error, thiserror, and anyhow), which is a pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls.
(There are a number of things which tend to be left out of new languages and are a pain to retrofit, because there will be nearly identical but incompatible versions. Constant types. Boolean types. Error types. Multidimensional array types. Vector and matrix types of size 2, 3, and 4 with their usual operations. If those are not standardized early, programs will spend much time fussing with multiple representations of the same thing. Except for error handling, these issues do not affect web dev much, but they are a huge pain for numerical work, graphics, and modeling, where standard operations are applied to arrays of numbers.)
Go has two main advantages for web services. First, goroutines, as the OP points out.
Second, libraries, which the OP doesn't mention much. Go has libraries for most of the things a web service might need, and they are the ones Google uses internally. So they've survived in very heavily used environments. Even the obscure cases are heavily used. This is not true of Rust's crates, which are less mature and often don't have formal QA support.
> Rust has three main error systems (io::Error, thiserror, and anyhow), which is a pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls
anyhow explicitly isn't designed for what you are trying to do here. It's designed to be the last link in the chain (and complementary to thiserror, not in competition). If you are using anyhow any deeper than your top-level binary crate, you are likely to be in for an unpleasant time.
I love Go and used to write it heavily for anything non LLM based.
Now that we have agentic coding I just write everything in Rust and couldn’t be happier. The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers. Now that we have agentic coding I’m not sure Go’s value prop holds up anymore
My rust services have been nothing short of amazing from a performance and reliability perspective
In my experience LLMs (I speak mainly of Claude Code & Cursor) write very poor quality Rust.
They treat it like it's JavaScript, falling back to using String/&str needlessly instead of making new types. They do ugly `static Mutex<Refcell<` a-la global JS variables for info sharing instead of working out the lifetimes to do it properly. It loves making functions infallible and then panic-ing within them and certainly I wouldn't use them for unsafe at all - they hallucinate safety comments which are in fact, totally unsound.
Of course these are all surmountable with an experienced developer to regularly step in and unfuck the code, but forcing them into 'harder' territory where every problem is not solved by a .clone() and an Arc<Mutex<>> means they will spend minutes 'thinking' about basic lifetime issues until I step in and add the missing `move` in a closure.
That is interesting. I make LLMs write C with the general hope that a simpler language they can manage well. That is not entirely true, though. They reason about C fluently indeed. The problem is, Claude pumps lots of bad C into the codebase if left unattended for 5 min.
So, I need some clean-up passes afterwards to get to some acceptable quality level (both by LLMs and my own eyes). At which point, Claude sees the problem clearly, for some mysterious reason.
Also, I use a C dialect heavly influenced by Go (slices, generics, no smart tricks, virtually no malloc).
For me the bottleneck now is reading/reviewing code, not writing code. As you said, AI makes it way easier to write, but do you not review the code? And isn't a verbose, cryptic language with lots of nitty gritty memory management not harder to read/review?
I'm not sold on Rust being a great language to use with AI unless the reason to use it is a lot more than just Rust being fashionable.
The verbose error handling diluting the interesting parts is one thing, but the main issue is the weak type system. Having to read the callee's code to check if it deviates from `res xor err`, or if it mutates its arguments. Figuring out which interface that `func (o *Obj) ()` is implementing, if any. Dealing with documentation that is a wall of 100 disappointing oneliners all repeating the function name.
Rust is information-dense and takes longer to master, but it's not inherently cryptic, there's a finite amount of things to know. Memory management sometimes take a bit of thought to write, but it's straightforward to review, you can trust it's correct if it compiles, you just keep an eye out for optimizations.
I don't see the difference in exploring an dense custom type system versus a flatter one. Both force you to look things up when you don't know about them.
In my opinion these problems originate in architectural style. Much of the open source written today is designed to impress the audience instead of focusing on the problem.
In my experience, Rust is only mildly unpleasant to review, if only because the GitHub PR review interface is not an IDE. It can be hard to tell why .as_ref()s and whatnot had to be used without being able to hover over a variable to see its type. This is probably because of the language's preference for type inference, though personally I would rather that than having to skim over explicit types.
Compared to Rust, Go as a language requires a lot more effort to review. You have to be on the lookout for basic gotchas like not checking if a pointer is nil, placing `defer` in the wrong place, using a result when err isn't nil, and so on. Plus, diffs are messier because unused variables are a compilation error, and _, err := can change into _, err = solely due to new lines above.
It's the same logic for human and for AI code: In Rust the compiler catches many bugs so you don't have to.
If the LLM gives you safe code you know there are entire classes of things you don't have to review for.
That said, I agree with you. My experience is that LLMs are great if you are highly competent in the domain in which you let them work. And it's probably easier to be competent in Go than in Rust.
Safe? No compiler is going to catch badly designed code, or intentionally backdoored code. Memory leaks as well. Compilers are the ground floor of validation and the least of your problems with AI generated code.
I found it's the opposite. Thanks to LLM's whole classes of problems otherwise solved by using Rust are gone. It's now more important that the generated code is easy to read.
Time isn't the constraint here, but ability. Someone complaining about how hard Rust is to write is probably not capable of reviewing Rust code very well.
The usual reaction or opinion from e.g. good C++ programmers switching to Rust is that the added guardrails and expressivity are great and make things easier.
IMO neither Go nor Rust are great for reading/reviewing code.
Go is too verbose and the type system isn't expressive enough. Rust code is littered with little memory management details and it requires tons of third party libraries.
I think coding agents will eventually be able to get the low level details right on their own. Reviewers should be able to focus on architecture, design and logic mistakes.
I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.
> I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.
Let’s make that specification Turing complete while at it.
Jokes aside, IMO it will be a good natural progression. Specify the problem statement in LLM specification, generate the code in Go/Rust whatever is the language of your choice and review the generated code to make sure it adheres to the architecture/design principles that you have set.
It absolutely should be Turing complete. I want to formally specify some constraints/invariants that any generated code has to meet, like very high level test cases.
It doesn't have to be a new language. I'm sure some existing language can be used to create a DSL that serves this purpose.
It can obviously never be complete. Some parts of the spec will always have to be natural language if we want to make the best use of LLMs.
Maybe we can have Large Logic Models instead, and they could have formalized keywords with rigid meanings? Like IF, WHILE and FOREACH maybe. Or even ASYNC if you want to be modern about it.
I do think that AI models should get better at logic. But if code generators are supposed to be tools, we have to tell them what to do. I'm not sure what combination of languages is best for that purpose.
It would be so much easier if we could precisely specify what we wanted, without all the double meanings, slang and general ambiguity that comes from using a natural language.
If only there was an entire class of well-studied languages which don't have any such ambiguity. They'd be perfect for programming LLMs! We could call them "programming languages" perhaps.
The benefit is if you lean heavily on types then successful compilation is a massive indicator in the feedback loop. Using stop hooks to ensure successful compilation after every iteration is a game changer. Go also has compilation of course but because the type system is so much more robust in Rust the compilation guarantees so much more about the behaviour of your program. You end up just code reviewing the shape and flow of data.
Code compiling is really the lowest bar of code validation, and doesn't say much of anything of the code running correctly. AI will pump out the most convoluted, over engineered, and at the same time sloppy code if you let it - and it will all compile fine.
Yes, but all else being equal it is a higher bar in Rust than in Go. There are fewer things left for the human to check after a clean build+lint in Rust than in Go. The issue of over-engineered AI output is orthogonal to that.
Go was never about being easy to write (thought it is), but it was always about being easy to read and it is, by far, the easiest language to read that I've ever used (and throughout the decades, I went through Basic, Pascal, C, Java, JavaScript, C#, TypeScript, Ruby and Python). That becomes even more important if you are not writing the code yourself...
you need to know the conventions to spot what's not there (did you miss the error handling? or the magic comment for the whatever codegen serializer? c'est la vie!)
> The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers.
In practice, anything that makes it easier for humans to program also makes it easier for LLMs to program.
You also wont typically learn that the LLM is close to the limits of understanding your code base until after it has blown past it's own capabilities, leaving you with a mountain of code that you are not skilled enough to fix.
Java, C# are good choices as they tend to enforce a certain structure. Go, good because it's very readable even if you dont know the language.
C++, Rust are poor choices unless you are already a senior in that language.
Go is really easy to read and write, even if Go's philosophy means that some of that feels clunky because it's less featureful than other languages. It makes up for it with a comprehensive stlib that makes it trivial to build services with few to no third party dependencies.
I don't think the value prop has changed at all there. One day the AI gravy train will stop and people who used AI to punch above their weight will no longer be able to debug the stuff they built unless they put in the hard work of learning the language.
Nothing to worry about with Go in that respect because of how much it's been designed to be simple. Even the annoying err/nil checks you need to do all the time are in service of that simplicity. It gets old fast but it leaves nothing to the imagination.
The value prop of Go in not on writing, but in reading and comprehension by people different from the autor(s).
For systems expected to last some years, this translates in reduced total cost of maintenance over the life of the system (in my experience typically 80% or more of the total cost) and facilitating traspassing maintenance to diferent people than the authors.
In use cases where Go has "good enough" performance, for backend systems with business logic and small amount of "bare metal" programming, I recommend Go to teams instead of Rust. When extreme performance and reduced memory footprint is more important than the other properties, Rust is better than Go.
>Now that we have agentic coding I just write everything in Rust and couldn’t be happier. The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers. Now that we have agentic coding I’m not sure Go’s value prop holds up anymore
Agents seem to have a better time with Go. Humans need to review the agents outputs and in general they have an easier time to do it with Go.
Rust has practically one error, it's the Error trait. The things you've listed are some common ways to use it, but you're entirely fine with just Box<dyn Error> (which is basically what anyhow::Error is) and similar.
They all convert seamlessly, and the enums make the branches explicit. Don't even need to check the documentation to find which errors supposedly exists like in Go with its errors.Is, errors.As, wrapping and what not.
An easy rule before you make a knowledge based choice is Thiserror for libraries, helping you create the standard library error types and Anyhow for applications, easy strings you bubble up.
Or just go with anyhow until you find a need for something else.
I’ve repeatedly tried using Rust and the error handling has tripped me up every time and has been ~90% of the reason for moving a project back to another language. I’m sure I’m just holding it wrong, but what I run into usually goes something like this (mind you, I have read the Rust book):
* Someone tells me to use enums for errors, in a comment like yours
* I try writing the enums by hand, implementing the error trait
* I realize that in order to use the ? operator I need to implement From on my errors (I’ve read so many comments about how awfully verbose Go errors are, so I assume I’m supposed to use ? in Rust). There are also some other traits IIRC but I’ve forgotten them.
* I realize that this is pretty tedious, manual work, so someone points me to thiserr or similar
* Now I’m debugging macro expansion errors and spending approximately the same amount of time
* I ask around and someone tells me not to bother with thiserr and to just write the boilerplate myself or else to use anyhow or boxed errors everywhere
* I try using boxed errors everywhere, which works, but now I have all of these allocations which feels like I’m doing something that will bite me later. Oh well, but now I need to annotate my errors so I can figure out what is actually happening. I guess I should use anyhow for this?
* Anyhow mostly works but this is approximately as verbose as the Go error handling that I’m told is Very Bad, and when I ask for code review most Rust people are telling me not to use anyhow because errors should be enums, at least in the API surface
I’m sure I’m doing it wrong, but as with many things in Rust, the Right Way is so rarely clear and every other Rust person gives different advice about how to solve my problem and the only thing they seem to agree on is that Rust has an easy solution and that I’m following the wrong advice. (Similarly when I had lifetime problems and half the community told me to just use clone and Rc everywhere until I had performance problems, so instead I just had different static analysis problems).
I don’t love Go’s error handling. It feels like there has to be something better than its runtime-typing. But it largely gets out of the way—creating an error is just implementing the Error method, and if you need a concrete type you use Is/As/AsType. Wrapping is fmt.Errorf. All of this is built into the stdlib and used pretty ubiquitously across the ecosystem—I don’t run into “this dependency uses a different error framework”. Error handling is marginally more verbose than with Rust if you are actually attaching context in both, and neither solves the problem of which call frame attaches the context about specific function parameters (e.g., which level of error context specifies that the function was called with path “/foo/bar.baz”). It’s terrible, but it works—feels like the least bad thing until the Rust community can arrive at some consensus and document it in The Book. Or maybe I just need to try again in the LLM era?
there are many (right) ways for writing monad transformers, and it's usually situation dependent which one makes sense. (practical aspects such as which errors do you want to merge, ignore, provide some default/fallback result; and of course overall coding style consistency helps guide this, but it's not trivial.)
(there's a lot of this in Scala too, because of the various monads/containers, eg. the built-in Future, and then Scalaz.IO, FS2, Cats, ZIO, etc...)
regarding lifetime and performance problems, the best practice seems to design the rough scaffolding of the program first, with the structs, so the who owns whom can be figured out. but this is far from trivial. Rust is very good at forcing developers to stare at these problems, but solving them requires practice and patience.
for me the tech toolbox that makes sense is TS by default (because of the super convenient type system and tooling), and Rust when the circumstances really justify it (latency, throughput, scalability, cost effectiveness, or a need for a single native executable [though nowadays this is also pretty simple with Deno], or more safety/control [no GC])
I'm so perplexed by this, because Rust errors are what make the language so amazing.
> Now I’m debugging macro expansion errors and spending approximately the same amount of time
This never happens once you've learned the language a bit more. Anyhow and thiserror are a cinch.
> I realize that this is pretty tedious, manual work, so someone points me to thiserr or similar
Claude writes Rust so effectively. It can do all of this for you now. It's effortless. In fact, I don't see any reason to use any other language unless I'm targeting web or some specific platform, or dealing with legacy code. Rust is now the best tool for most problems.
> Similarly when I had lifetime problems and half the community told me to just use clone and Rc everywhere until I had performance problems, so instead I just had different static analysis problems
Do this for a month, then it'll click and be second nature. Also Claude will make quick work of it now.
> feels like the least bad thing until the Rust community can arrive at some consensus and document it in The Book
It's difficult because it's so different. But once you get used to it, you'll realize it's the best approach we have right now.
> Or maybe I just need to try again in the LLM era?
Seriously this. You'll be writing Rust code as quickly as you would Python code. It'll be high quality. And the type system will mean that Claude emits better code on average. You'll pick it up quickly.
I think Claude may be what makes me use Rust successfully. Firstly it’s ability to deal with the tedium and secondly not needing to solicit help from people who tell me my problem is trivial while giving contradictory solutions :)
> And the type system will mean that Claude emits better code on average.
I’m curious if this is true. I believe that it emits better code than with a dynamically typed language, but as with people I don’t know that the sweet spot is at the extreme. Or maybe it is at the extreme when the context is small but as the context grows perhaps code quality suffers as it has more constraints to balance?
Anything other than panic/abort on allocation failure is outside the scope of the vast majority of programs, including anything using the standard library in Rust. I wouldn't worry about Box<dyn Error>.
Do you really want that data passed back down to the caller of the allocation? From the description of the failure state you'd want to log that data instead: what's the caller of the allocation going to do if you tell it it failed with a crazy size? It already knows the size, it's the one who asked for it.
So, suppose it's a rust library -- you're locking me into whatever logging system the library author chooses? Maybe I'd like to consume the relevant data at the entry point and send it to a logging system of my choice.
A Rust library likely wouldn't be returning an opaque Box<dyn Error> to begin with. Errors are part of a library's API—it's what allows consumers to handle them—so you'd define an enum of possible errors your library could produce and return that, which would be stored on the stack.
I think this is a clash of terminology: a Rust enum isn't an integer with pretensions of an identity.
You'd describe it as a tagged union in some languages. So when you say you'd return an error with extra information, what that information is is associated with the specific variant of the enum.
Using yuriks AllocError as an example, if the error is SizeTooLarge, it has the size field. Other errors may have no additional data, others may have different data.
When you return an error from your allocating function, it's a known size, the size of the largest enum variant + the discriminant (tag).
You can do better than the errors in other languages. You can provide all the relevant information in the emum variant.
enum MyApiBindingCrateError {
// You didn't provide an
// API key. Maybe we should
// design our interface to
// make this impossible
ApiKeyMissing,
// Client was unauthorized
// to make this request
AuthorizationError,
// The entity you requested
// did not exist (404'd)
NotFoundError,
// You're sending too many
// requests to the server
TooManyRequests,
// That specific error with
// the API
// Maybe users can't delete
// folders until they're empty
// Whatever
SpecificApiIssue1,
// Some other specific error
// with the API
SpecificApiError2,
// Server didn't respond the
// way we expected.
// Here's what it told us
UnexpectedHttpResponse {
// HTTP status code
status_code: StatusCode,
// If it had a
// string-encoded body
body: Option<String>,
},
// Unhandled Issue with IO
IoError(io::Error),
// Unhandled Issue with
// request library
ReqwestError(reqwest::Error),
}
The beauty with Rust is that you can create really detailed concrete errors at the crate level. Your callers will know exactly what the actual error states are.
Your application can be a little less structured if you want. Though with LLMs, I'm using anyhow and thiserror a lot less.
it depends, if the functionality represented by the library is known to require a lot of memory (or simply allocation failures are an expected part of its operation), then it should be pretty much part of the API, probably with some tracing/diagnostics interface to get the required visibility into how much memory goes and where.
but for most libraries I on allocation failure I don't expect any fancy logging system. maybe even panic is fine.
usually “stdout” is good enough, wrapper/runner routes output to logserver for collation and search. who cares about formats as long as it’s reasonably structured and searchable?
That's because the types of errors where you want a stack trace are a relatively small subset of all possible errors.
Stack traces are only useful for errors that indicate a bug in the program, i.e. something a programmers has to respond to. It's not useful for the vast class of bugs that are a result of wrong input, wrong external state, or infrastructure issues.
Rust projects tend to favor panicking over error handling for programmer bugs (which does indeed give you a stack trace depending on environment variables), or even better encoding the invariants in the type system, but there are cases where an error coming from a library are truly, actually unexpected, so both `anyhow` and `thiserror` do provide support for attaching a stack trace in those situations.
If you let the allocation error panic you will get your stack trace.
You can't have a stack trace on an error in the error path that failed to allocate. If you have a "jumbo sized" error and the error fails to allocate, it won't get reported. The only reporting you will get is that the error failed to allocate and this new allocation error overrides the error that failed to allocate.
You're already writing Rust in a very different style if you're writing the type of code that gracefully handles allocation failure. It's to Rust's immense credit that this type of coding is actually fairly well-supported (unlike in Go), but you're already a bit off the beaten path for stuff like error handling.
If you need to handle an allocation error in the error path, then the error reporting path must abort, which means that the allocation error must be bubbled up.
There is no real solution to an allocation error inside the error path. Even if you preallocate an arena for errors, the error might be large enough that it won't fit inside the arena.
Hence the best thing you can do from that point onwards is to have an error enum with an AllocError variant that doesn't allocate. Said error won't contain any information beyond line numbers of the allocation error since you just don't have the space for it.
In the end you will basically end up with panic free code, but the error still bubbles up like regular unwinding.
So yeah you can do it, and I will do it in the future, but I personally think that the people who think this is some huge deal breaker don't understand the problem in the first place.
For me the main advantage of Go over Rust is compilation speed. Then compared with Go Rust still rely on many C and C++ libraries making it problematic to cross-compile or generate reproducible builds or static binaries.
The minus side of Go is too simplistic GC. When latency spikes hit, there are little options to address them besides painful rewrite.
I've run into GC pauses, I think in many (most?) cases there is some class of bulky data that you can either move into slices of pointer-free structs (so the GC doesn't scan them) or off-heap entirely. The workload where GC is slow is also likely prone to fragmentation so whatever the language you'll have to deal with it.
Java with its copying GC deals fine with fragmentation albeit at the cost of more upfront memory. And even in Rust one can change the allocator to try to deal with fragmentation. But with Go there is simply no good options besides the rewrite.
Possibly in your specific application, usually there are a handful of options far less painful than a rewrite.
For the original issue of GC pauses, a narrow change is to move problem data to non-pointer-carrying types, or the bigger hammer of manually managed slices of those types. The second helps with fragmentation too. Some workloads can be split into multiple processes as a direct way to have smaller heaps. If none of those options are enough then off-heap storage lets you do whatever you want.
I do have some complaints about Go, but one of the big ones has been fixed since I last wrote much Go code and it seems like a fine choice for a lot of applications.
> For me the main advantage of Go over Rust is compilation speed.
Interestingly, Rust has quite good failed compilation speed. That's almost good enough. The usual Rust experience is that it's hard to get things to compile, and then they work the first time.
I've never been bothered by long compilation times, it gives me time to think about what the code should actually do.
To other people's usage patterns though, I imagine the group of people who don't do much with the type system rely more on running a built binary to see if it worked, which means they'll pay the full compile/link time cost more often.
Isn’t it somewhat easy to remove allocations in Go? I haven’t had to “rewrite” as such, but rather lifting some allocation out of loop. Am I misunderstanding the scenario?
Pauses are a problem with heap size and structure, not allocation rate, because the pause is caused by GC code that is O(heap size). Making garbage slower reduces the frequency but not severity. This is an issue with most GCs to some degree, there are phases of collection where the GC stops execution and the duration is relative to how much work it has to do which is based on how many objects and how much memory needs to be checked. "Concurrent" garbage collection is the approach of trying to reduce the pauses by doing more of the work while program execution continues. It's complicated and hard to get right, so Go's original GC was IIRC fully stop-the-world.
There are some fine points to the O(heap size), for example it's clearly unnecessary for the GC to scan objects that do not themselves contain pointers, and work is somewhat proportional to the total number of objects. Combining numerous small objects into manually managed slices, coming up with ways to make the most numerous items pointer-free, etc.
I learned a bit about this when an analytics workload I had ended up with unacceptable pauses (I think over 1 second), Go's GC is more sophisticated now but I think in any GC runtime you have the same considerations to some degree. Some of the best writing at the time was by Gil Tene, one of the principal authors of the C4 concurrent collector at Azul Systems, starting point here:
With backend serving many clients with widely varying performance profile of individual requests when latency spikes happen there is no particular hot loop. Just many go routines each doing reasonable thing but with a particular request pattern hitting pathological case of GC.
Yes but Rust has a lot more availability of libraries to do stuff as a result. Want to do anything ML or scientific? You at least have a route in Rust where you don’t with Go.
With Go basic stuff like url parsing or HTTPS support is written in Go and comes with the standard library. With Rust too many necessary things are just wrappers around C and C++ making cross-compilation and reproducible builds much harder to archive.
As for availability if CGO is ok, then calling C or C++ code from Go is not that hard. Also, there is always an option to just start C++ process if extra data copies are OK.
Has there been a lot of progress with ML in Rust? I don't really keep up with it because it seems like every crate ends up getting abandoned and I just gave up caring.
I agree! The line early on about this being for backend services caught my attention. I love the Rust language and use it for embedded firmware and PC applications, but still use Python for web backends, because Rust doesn't have any tool sets on the tier of Django (Or Rails). It has Flask analogs, without the robust Flask ecosystem. I have less experience with Go, but would choose it over Rust for web backends, for the same reason you highlight: The library (including framework) ecosystem. I am also not the biggest Async Rust fan for the standard reasons (The rust web ecosystem is almost fully Async-required).
Conversely, the Go community tends to actively shun frameworks, especially anything Rails-like, and will tell you to just use the standard library. Which is good advice, the standard library really does have everything you need. But it's also roughly on a par with what's available in Rust (though as someone said above, the Go stdlib routines have been heavily, massively, tested in production by now, and are fully mature and load-bearing).
Interesting! Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project? Or each person and org has their own toolkit they use?
I think few people would want to use an ORM for the stuff you use Go for, but there are things like SQLC which can generate a lot of your "dynamic DB magic" without actually being a real dependency. You can set SQLC up to run in a container in a completely isolated environment, and then use the output, but you can frankly also just maintain the SQL which frankly isn't that different than using an ORM once you've set up the automation with ridicilously strict policies.
We use Go for some of our more vital backend parts. We mainly use Python for entirely different reasons, but since we're an energy company it's nice to have a standard library that can do everything without any sort of external dependencies. It's not because we have some sort of "not invented here" fetish, it's because we have to write and maintain a literal fuckton of complaince documents for every external dependency we use and it's already a full time job for just for Python in our information security department.
There are various libraries people use for auth, etc. But rolling your own isn't hard - Go has (e.g.) bcrypt in the standard library, so most of the heavy lifting is already done, you can write a solid auth implementation in <50 lines of code using that.
Generally Go prefers libraries to frameworks. Wrap the hard bits up into a library that can then be used widely in any implementation, rather than rolling it into a one-size-fits-all implementation that doesn't really suit anyone properly.
I second that no-ORM statement. I even follow that in Java. Object mapping is fine, but I’ll write my own SQL, rather than debug obscure (to me) HQL queries.
“we” are all different and i can tell you from experience that there are also many people and teams who use go and prefer ORMs and frameworks and do not build everything from scratch …
This is typical Go culture. If it is not readily available in the language or the standard library, it's evil. It's an easy cop out to explain away the gaps in the ecosystem.
Not long ago, the Go team was saying that generics are evil for that very same reason.
Rust backend is like this too, albeit softer. The gaps are explained as "Why would I want that/I don't need that" instead of "evil".
My GitHub is dominated by rust projects, and I think it's the nicest overall language. But not nice enough to write bespoke solutions for problems that have had robust solutions since before I started programming! There is a basic set of functionality most web apps use, and that hasn't changed in a decade+; I don't want to re-write my own version of this, nor fight compatibility problems from (comparatively) poorly-integrated and documented libs.
I am trying to make good decisions, and am weighing "This long-standing solution does everything I need, and is easy to use and well-documented etc" vs "People on the internet are telling me I don't need it, or I can use X rust lib instead". It feels like the "We have McDonald's at home" meme.
>Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project?
lmao, basically, yes. except when you bring this up ppl think it's not a big deal / a means for self-expression. having to sort through which libraries you prefer to glue together is a kind of freedom, if you squint hard enough.
…the "dataset_id" path variable is parsed straight into the dataset_id arg, and a query string "verbose" is parsed into a boolean. Super convenient compared to Go, and you type validation along with it.
Many other things to like: The absence of context.Context, the fact that handlers can just return the response data, etc.
I'm not sure if that's a great example. What kind of errors could ShouldBindQuery return?
I would assume Axum returns a bad request error for you when query parsing fails, but if you do want more control over how the error is handled, you can change the parameter type to Result<Query<bool>, QueryRejection>, and the type system itself documents precisely what errors you can match against.[0]
To be fair, it's not -quite- as useful - `req.PathValue` only returns `string` and you have to do the conversion to other types yourself which could lead to a faffy mess of code.
Rust does not have three error systems. It has one: the Error trait. io::Error is one of many that implement it (nothing special about it). Errors defined via thiserror also implement it.
“Anyhow” just allows you to conveniently say “some Error” if you don’t care to write out an API contract specifying types of errors your function might spit out.
Not sure what you mean by that. If you're consuming the API of a crate that has functions that return errors, you're not really dealing with a "framework", you're just dealing with whatever the `E` is in the `Result<T, E>`. If that `E` doesn't implement std::error::Error, I'd consider that a deficiency (even a bug) for that crate. (Yes, I know some crates want to support use in `no_std` environments; that's what features are for.)
If I care about the specific variants of error that a function can return, so I can do different things depending on what kind of error occurred, I'll read the docs and match. That's not really a "framework" thing; that's just a basic thing that anyone has to do in any language in order to consume an API. If I need to propagate the error, I'll do so (either directly, or by wrapping it in a variant of my own error type). I don't see how any of this is "framework"-y.
A crate's decision to use thiserror (or not) does not matter to me. If a crate exposes `anyhow::Error`, that's a lazy choice and bad API design, but still "works" and I generally don't need to care about it.
Or is there something else you meant when you said "error frameworks"?
I guess you might have to if you need to use a library someone's written that doesn't implement the standard.
Writing primarily applications, I couldn't tell you what error handling frameworks my dependencies are using: I literally don't know, and haven't needed to know in order to display, fail, or succeed.
EDIT to add: I use anyhow for this, so I should also add "add context to an error when I fall" to the list of things I do.
What's the standard? I'm not being snarky; I'm going down the thought process of how this would work in practice.
I am on team Io Error [on std rust]", somewhat arbitrarily. If I call a lib that is on Team Anyhow, or Team Custom Error Enum, I will have to do some (Straightfoward, but a little clumsy) conversions if I want ? to work. This is complicated by being able to impl From<ErrorType1> for ErrorType2 only in one direction if you don't control the other crate. (due to the orphan rule)
By standard I meant an error type that implements std::error::Error.
EDIT: Which I assume all my dependencies have done, given that anyhow is able to consume all of them.
I specifically called out writing applications as my use case: my only objection to tptacek's note is the somewhat universal "in practice". The burden for designing errors for a library that others will use is higher, but that's far from the default/universal experience.
Many more people are going to consume libraries & not produce any of their own, and I think my experience is representative there.
Not rust specific, and most certainly not a criticism of you - but I hate when people call a lib that errors, then just bubble that error up.
I mean the error is supposed to be tailored to the audience - I guess what you are saying is that you handle the error by saying "I called foo with X, Y, Z, and got this error back" in the logs - which your caller then also does - producing a log message of
ERROR: I called Foo with X Y and Z and got error: Die MF die
followed by
ERROR: I called Bar with X Y Z and a and got error: ERROR: I called Foo with X Y and Z and got error: Die MF die mf (still fool)
And so on and so forth.
If the counter is - don't log, that's fine, but you have to know where in the call graph that error state was reported to the logs
I have tried to figure out some kind of unification between "collecting error state in a function", "logging error state", and "return error state to a parent".
I haven't found any satisfying solution to it all; collecting information for logging vs information that a caller would want... I've been meaning to investigate tracing_error to see if it brings it all together.
Regardless of language - if you find a good, clear answer - blog the hang out of it - I for one have been searching for the right way to manage this, and it's not (yet) clearer - other than what I've said so far
Yeah - but that's the same as my final point - you have to know who is supposed to manage the error/log - all the way up (and down) the call graph
edit: I've just finished debugging a multi system chain - FE -> SNS -> SQS -> Lambda -> DynamoDB -> Lambda -> Webhook -> My poor code
My code has multiple layers - and I was trying to find where in the very long chain of calls the data was being mangled
It turned out that there was an unlogged error, which was mismanaged by a caller - there's no shade here - the caller was handling the error how it was designed to, but by not logging that there was an error - it took a minute to understand.
I was a big fan of go for a while. Though now that I have programmed more swift and rust recently, having a compiler that doesn’t protect against null pointer deferences or provide concurrency safety guarantees feels a little prehistoric.
Though go certainly did a much better job than rust on the standard library front.
Standard library is something you have to maintain for all eternity, with identical API. It had been argued that some concurrency primitives like channels would have been better outside of std (for rust, to be clear). Once dependency management is solved, a small std is beneficial.
> you have to maintain for all eternity, with identical API
People always tout this as a huge reason for not wanting a too big std in Rust (or "too useful" either), but IMHO that's just talking about reaching theoretical optimals, while leaving the community for years without good guidance via providing a opinionated practical and pragmatic way of doing things. Which I find to be a very unhelpful stance for a tool such as a programming language.
If a design of some std package didn't pass the test of time, and a new iteration would be beneficial, the language can leave its original API version right there, and evolve with a v2, with an improved and better thought out API after learning from the mistakes of v1.
Prime example: "hey we found that math/rand had some flaws, so here is math/rand/v2". A practical solution, and zero dramas as a result of having rand be part of std.
Perhaps it would help if stdlibs were be versioned, with the chosen version declared in the project file. For existing languages, a lack of version would simply indicate the original stdlib, meaning nothing should break.
I definitely don't think stdlibs should be changed often, but it seems fairly damaging to a language when things may be added to a stdlib but never removed, no matter how broken or misconceived (see C++).
Rust is a great language, but the poor stdlib + overreliance on crates + explosion of unvetted transient dependencies makes it a hard sell for a lot of projects.
I use go because of the large and useful stdlib. I rarely have to reach for an external library, and even then I only consider libraries that are very popular. If a library isn’t available, I’ll just write my own, using the stdlib. I recently used the awesome crypto library to implement an envelope encryption system, I didn’t need anything outside of the stdlib or Google’s x library (x is effectively the experimental stdlib).
Having too much external code, like npm or rust crates, seems like a nightmare for me.
I believe the stdlib can't be versioned like that: there's only one stdlib linked into a final artifact, you can't have two versions with differing APIs in there.
There's work on edition aware name resolution so that a type with the "nice path" can change over an edition while still accessible through a longer path, but 1) it's not implemented yet, 2) it hasn't been used yet (see 1), 3) if it is ever used it should be done very sparingly (because of the bafflement that can occur if someone follows older docs in the new edition, implementation will come with efforts to mitigate these problems).
For me going from JVM and CLR ecosystem of programming languages into Go for backend development is a downgrade.
The language design makes sense in the context of Oberon (1987), and Limbo (1995).
Now when there are so many options finally building on top of Standard ML, and Lisp heritage, having to settle with Go feels like a downgrade.
I code since 1986, if I wanted if boilerplate error handling, or having cost as the only mechanism to declare constant values, there have been plenty of options.
In Go you can ignore the error value though, and use directly the returned value (`int` in your example). In Rust you cannot do that, you need to unwrap the Result or use the `?`
If the returned value is still valid despite an error, then the function would return (u32, Option<Error>), perfectly valid rust. If the value is meaningless in case of an error then using it is incorrect code; you wouldn't want to do that in either language and rust makes that assumption explicit with unwrap. If you want a default value in case of error just use unwrap_or_default.
Not quite true. The unifying error trait is std::error::Error.
> pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls
Kind of? You just make an enum with the various variants that need to be passed through and use the #[from] macro to generate the conversion code automatically.
It’s more characters than eg. A union type in Python or TypeScript, but it’s not much more.
Plus, it makes you think about your error design, which is important!
It's not that bad, but when compared to C or Go, it's not something that I would like to type by hand. At least Java has IDEs which reduce the amount of verbosity you need to type. I know you get safety, but the verbosity and cargo is is a con in my opinion.
I just hate how many dependencies you have to pull in for a typical Rust project vs Go. As far as Go being an ugly language, there are some interesting wrappers that put lipstick on that pig such as https://lisette.run/
But personally, I don’t mind Go at all. I’ve even begun to prefer it for some things. That may be Stockholm syndrome, though.
thiserror and anyhow are just std::error with extra steps. Note that io::error is just a specific std::error.
The entire point in Rust is that you wrap Error impls with other Error impls, or translate one impl into another using a match. I've found this is far more flexible and verifiable than most other languages, because if you craft your error types with enough rigor, you can basically have a complete semantic backtrace without the overhead of a real backtrace.
I use thiserror a lot to help with my impls. Notably, all it does is impl Display and Error. It's not a specific other paradigm because it basically compiles out, it's just a macro.
Anyhow is perhaps the closest one to another paradigm because it allows you to discard typed information in favor of just the string messages, but it still integrates well with Errors (and is one).
They're external crates that either generate Error implementations (thiserror) or act as dynamic wrappers implementing Error (anyhow), so they're more than a simple hand-written implementation. But the developer experience of pulling thiserror or anyhow off the shelf can certainly be more convenient than the hand-written implementation, sure.
I find Elixir's memory and threading models much more compelling than Go's for web services. There are many great libraries for Elixir as well, but if you need something else, Elixir makes rolling your own libraries very easy. I'd recommend giving Elixir a try, if you haven't already.
>I could see migrating from C or C++ or Python to Rust, for various reasons, but for web back-end work Go is a good match. I write almost entirely in Rust, but the last time I had to do something web server side in Rust, I now wish I'd used Go.
Now there is a cult of rewriting everything in Rust. System level software? Yes. Web? I prefer not to.
Praising go for how it handles errors, when it's even worse than C where the compiler at least warns you if you're ignoring return values of calls. That's a new one.
Linters are available to catch you before you compile - with Go
Generally speaking there has to be a mechanism for optional handling of return values, in Go you can ignore everything (ew), you can use placeholders `_`, or you can explicitly handle things - my preference.
If you say "Well in C you have to handle the returns - I am not across C enough to comment, but I will ask you - Does C actually force you, or does it allow you to say "ok I will put some variables in to catch the returns, but I will never actually use those variables" - because that's very much the same as Go with the placeholder approach
edit: I am told the following is possible in C
trySomething(); // Assumes that the author of trySomething has not annotated the function as a `nodiscard`
(void)trySomething(); // Casts the return(s) to void, telling the compiler to ignore the non-handling
int dummy = trySomething(); // assign to a variable that's never used again
C, as a language, cannot bother less about you using or not using the return values, checking them, discarding them, or using them to index an array without any bounds checking. Various linters and compilers may have their opinions, expressed as warnings, but at the end of the day it's completely up to you as a developer.
This is a weird document that is simultaneously trying to serve as a migration guide and an advocacy document for Rust.
Ultimately, if you have to ask, the Rust vs. Go consideration boils down almost completely to "do you want a managed runtime or not". A generation of Rust programmers has convinced itself that "managed runtime" is bad, that not having one is an important feature. But that's obviously false: there are more programming domains where you want a managed runtime than ones where you don't.
That's not an argument for defaulting to Go in all those cases! There are plenty of subjective reasons to prefer Rust. I miss `match` when I write Go (I do not miss tokio and async Rust, though). They're both perfectly legitimate choices in virtually any case where you don't have to distort the problem space to fit them in (ie: trying to write a Go LKM would be a weird move).
The Rust vs. Go slapfight is a weird and cringe backwater of our field. Huge portions of the industry are happily building entire systems in Python or Node, and smirking at the weirdos arguing over which statically typed compiled language to use. Python vs. (Rust|Go) is a real question. Rust vs. Go isn't.
Exactly. 95% of programmers are application programmers - they ship software used by regular users. I think it's insane to use a non-GC language for most of those cases. Manual memory management is mentally taxing and it's easy to make catastrophic mistakes. The marginal benefit from it is just not worth it unless you're making games or a trading system.
5% who write tools or other "infra" layer for the other 95% to work on top of maybe need that level of control over memory. It doesn't make any sense to me to sign up for that complexity unless you really really need it.
What "cloud memory costs"? Most Rust code is an informally-specified version of the old Python reference-counting GC. That's how you're supposed to write it, with clone() everywhere, and then dropping down to optimize. You can do the same thing with Go in the other direction by writing an allocator.
People believe a lot of weird things about these languages.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but non-GC language doesn't mean you have to do memory management manually? I mean, for example, in Rust (or modern C++), it's basically automatic. There is no mental tax or catastrophic mistakes as far as I know.
I'm not saying Rust is worse than Go. It obviously isn't. But this argument that Rust's memory management isn't more cognitively demanding than Go's memory management --- that isn't true.
Certainly you pay a price for lifetimes but you buy compile time race condition detection via the borrow checker's aliasing-xor-mutability enforcement. So all that is happening is the complexity of concurrency is being made explicit and therefore easier to reason about. Many applications can be architected in a way that wouldn't ever trigger a race, so for people working on that it isn't something they would need to reason about and they can call it unneeded complexity. This is the simpler vs. simplistic distinction also made in the article. If you can be simplistic, garbage collection is less cognitively demanding, but if you are designing race free algorithms with shared memory then rust will be. I do believe more developers and applications live in the former.
The better example actually comes from the article: returning a struct and an iterator over that struct isn't possible in rust. Heck, initializing a struct to return an iterator might lead to issues. Most people will encounter this before needing a linked list and the lesson it teaches will help out with the linked list.
Rust doesn't promise that your safe Rust doesn't have race conditions only specifically that it doesn't have the one very weird kind of race condition from computers with no analogue to the real world, a Data Race.
An ordinary race condition would be e.g. you put the cat out of the front door, then you walk to the kitchen and close that door - well, the cat might race around the outside of the house and get in first. Our world has race conditions, Rust doesn't solve them, take appropriate care.
A data race is much stranger, it's caused by a difference between how humans think about programming ("Sequential consistency" ie time's arrow X causes Y, therefore Y happens after X) and how the machine works (a modern multi-core computer does not exhibit this consistency) maybe you and your house mate both pick up the cat and she tries to put it out the kitchen door, you try to put it out the front door, this seems to work fine mostly but then on Tuesday the cat explodes, everything is covered in cat fur, messy. Rust actually has a whole layer of extra stuff beyond the aliasing-XOR-mutability to prevent this mistake because humans struggle to reason properly about software which loses sequential consistency so it almost doesn't matter what it "means" if this is lost.
> In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from [...] knowingly and deliberately using words in a different sense than the one the audience will understand.
Of course I mean data race, most people in such a thread will implicitly understand that is the race meant. Nobody building a webshop with limited supplies wants to prevent "first come first served", it barely makes sense to think about preventing that kind of race
Data races have obvious real world analogues, they are just so obvious people naturally synchronize. You can look over someone's shoulder while they update a paper master copy and observe data tearing as they erase a field and start writing in another value while that is inconsistent with the rest of the form. It is easy to see that data is being modified and wait until the writer is complete instead of memorizing a partial update and walking away to make decisions on the basis of the incomplete information. A good mutex/rwlock is like having a private separate room to go into to make the update so that no overeager person can even observe the partial update (some languages have non callback style mutexes so there the mutex/lock is the analogue of the visual cue that someone is performing the update). I don't find this at all strange to consider. In a concurrent system it is just all too easy to forget that there are other threads (analogue of people) reading/modifying at the same time. So rust makes that manifest through the borrow checker and it becomes obvious.
Rust prevents more than just data races. Even in single threaded code, if you have a reference to a struct (without explicitly choosing interior mutability), you are guaranteed that its value has not changed since the last time you read it, despite other parts of the code having a reference to it. You don't need to make defensive copies. Some people may find this useful, but generally it won't be enough to convince someone to drop their current language in favor of rust. This transfers into multi-threaded code as well: only a single thread can make modifications to a struct through a reference xor as many threads as you want can read from the struct with references. You can easily write go/java/python programs that have these features and so don't feature data races, but they are difficult to reason about: how do you know that there is only a single reference featuring mutation or many threads only reading? The answer requires non-local knowledge which is difficult to reason about and this is enough for some people to consider rust where the answer is local (defined by the variable).
> But this argument that Rust's memory management isn't more cognitively demanding than Go's memory management --- that isn't true.
It's not far from true. The fights you get into with the borrow checker can be legendary, but lifetimes serve more as gentle reminders. If you get stuck, you can always just use Rc, which is pretty close to opt-in GC. But it's rare to have to resort to Rc, because ownership is just not that much of a problem. In fact, I very rarely use Box either. All heap memory allocation is done by containers, not manually by me. I guess the main friction point for lifetimes is Rust's closures and async, but if you avoid them life is pretty simple.
In return for wearing this almost not a problem, you almost don't have to think about releasing a whole pile of other things - like closing files, sockets, and locks. They are guaranteed to be released by the same mechanism.
On balance, I would not be surprised if the cognitive balance tips Rust's way once you allow for the fact that Rust's memory management also gives you robust resource management for free.
How is Aria's linked list document relevant on this topic? Go is the kind of language where they'd call their growable array type "List" because why not. C# did that in fact, when it gained generics they named their generic growable array List<T>
So the linked list is a thing Go doesn't have at all, in Go the equivalent document probably just reminds you of Go's rule "Don't be clever". Thanks Go, I'll keep it in mind.
Generally the argument is that non-GC languages require you to worry about memory management because of Use-after-free, but of course safe Rust just won't compile if you wrote a typical use-after-free so that's not really extra cognitive demand.
You seem to imply that it doesn’t have any cost. It does. You have to make decisions and, in the case of C++: sometimes you have to deal with a lot of really ugly code to make it “automatic”. And if you really have to count bytes and carefully manage stack sizes because you are writing code for a constrained device, you have to pay even more attention than you would in C.
GC’ed languages have memory related challenges too. But it simply isn’t true that these are on the same order of difficulty as the difficulties that do arise in C++.
This is just a matter of perspective. Backend IS being "shipped" to user via the API be it go or rust and inevitably the details and behavior do leak out to end user.
If youre not writing the code yourself and vibing away which I think most people generally are despite the disdain around here then why would you not choose the "more performant language" (I know that isnt necessarily reality but it is a common perception).
Go's managed runtime is less valuable when the LLM is perfectly happy to slap a bunch of stuff together for you to and approximate it and doesn't complain at all when writing async rust despite some of the rough edges.
Correction: The use of LLMs has caused every major language usage to explode.
And as mentioned in other comments, Rust slow compilation can be detrimental to LLMs + fast iteration speed. And it's not just speed, Tauri takes 20GB of disk space to compile. It's bonkers. This is npm/js ecosystem all over again but slower.
Another reason to pick Go if you're leaning on LLMs is the standard library. Often you can do more work with fewer dependencies.
I'd rather leverage world class engineers paid by Google to maintain dependencies for me than try my luck with half a dozen of 0.x crates. Plus stdlib APIs can (and are) versioned just like third party dependencies.
Fully agree with this. We use Rust in an enterprise setting for building web app backends and the experience is painful. A lot of crates just seem like someones side project. Too many ways to do things leads to bike shedding in PRs. Compile times are atrocious and can take like 30 mins to build.
Honestly using Go would have got us to the same point much quicker, with code that is much easier to review.
I like vibe coding but I am sceptical that a vibe coded runtime in Rust would be as awesome as the Go runtime which is written with deep expertise of Unix software and threading and many low level details that are subtle and do depend on global properties of the code to work flawlessly. It makes sense you can crank out Rust with an LLM if you know what you are doing, but if you want a GC type thing or preemptive scheduling across an N by M threading model, then you are competing against some very good code.
I don't agree with the parent comment, but mmap is exposed (low-level) in the standard library and there's a high-level wrapper in x/exp. You need to be careful with mmap no matter where you're using it.
I agree that agents make Rust a lot more tenable for less "kernel-and-browser"-demanding tasks than it was 4 years ago, but I do not agree that they eliminate the "managed vs. unmanaged runtime" question, and to the extent they influence any of this decisionmaking at all, you have to accept the notion of not reading the code. If you're reading it, it matters that Rust makes you do bookkeeping that managed runtimes avoid.
By that reasoning, we should all be vibing away C code. It's the most performant and efficient language out there, there's a ton of code out there the LLMs were trained on, and the complex logic of memory management is abstracted away by the LLM so you don't need to think about it.
Most people are not doing that though. There's probably a good reason, and it applies to other languages too.
There is a good chance that your vibe coded C program segfaults immediately upon running and contains lots of subtle logic errors, all of which requires many iterations (finding issues at runtime) before you program runs as expected.
With Rust, you'll likely get many compilation errors, but if your syntax is correct, compilation errors will be few, and your code will almost certainly just work.
I wouldn't build anything in C that I didn't absolutely have to, but, no, there is not in fact a good chance that your vibe-coded C program segfaults immediately.
> The use of LLMs has caused Rust usage to explode.
Rust had a "vibey" community long before vibecoding. In particular, it's long been fairly non-serious about yolo importing a bunch of crates to solve things (since the standard lib is small) which is kinda the same problem as having all those things just vibecoded. Either way, most projects weren't reading all of that other code!
For the vast majority of software you want a managed runtime.
Some of the problems Rust “solves” are problems you shouldn’t be having in the first place because we mostly write software that doesn’t need direct control over memory. Borrow checking isn’t something you want to have to deal with - it is something you have to accept when you have chosen to manage memory. That choice has a high cost that cost never gets paid off in most projects that could work just as fine with managed memory.
I’m a Go programmer, but this article reminded me that I should have more experience with Rust. From my perspective Rust seems a bit less practical. The standard library lacks support for cryptography, for instance. The compiler is slow, which is a productivity killer. Overall concurrency seems like a bit of an afterthought. Again.
What makes me want to try Rust in production are things like option types. Those would be nice to have in any language. Any issues that can be caught by the compiler are a plus. Getting rid of nil would also be a plus, but to be quite frank, I don’t experience that many nil pointer errors.
The author does nod to the static analysis tools for Go. Yes, they are not part of the compiler (for good reason), but they do a pretty good job in practice. So you get more than the compiler can promise at a fraction of the cost (measured in build time). That’s a much bigger deal for actual developers than we generally give it credit for.
Then there’s the stuff that makes me less convinced in terms of arguments. For instance the fact that Go didn’t have generics early on and that the standard library doesn’t use them. Generics were not as important as people thought they were. In practical reality. The fact that the standard library doesn’t make wide use of them is not a weakness, it shows restraint. They didn’t go overboard and prematurely plaster generics all over the place as soon as the language supported it. This is the kind of restraint you want to see. Remember how horrible Java was after everyone started abusing generics? A brief generation of software that was significantly worse, and less maintainable resulted from this exuberance. For the ultimate example of what happens when you give people every feature they wish for: look at C++. It´s not a very good language because it is many languages. Just because there are standards and recommendations doesn’t mean that all code magically gets rewritten to a narrower definition of the language. It means that we accumulate intermediate forms. I expect people who are interested in languages to understand these dynamics.
Rust's stdlib is small, Go took more of Python's "batteries included" strategy.
So in that sense it seems like a category error to try to look for crypto stuff in the standard library. Of course this brings the well known problem of "okay, but then which one should I use?". Nowadays this is largely solved by a few web searches and LLM queries, and people are quite helpful at https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/ .
Go was shaped by the needs of Google, Rust is a wildly successful amazing experiment in programming language and compiler design that really got out of hand :) (A bit like JavaScript! Or even C#! Or Python. Same growing pains (async/await!), but arguably on different levels.)
Aren't you overlooking the main point of the article?, the reason they migrated:
> concurrency — eliminating data races essentially, which we had before. Really gnarly bugs
> this is the one teams report most enthusiastically. The classes of bugs that survive go test -race and reach production (data races, nil dereferences, missed error paths) just don’t compile in Rust. Oncall rotations are typically very boring after a Rust migration. ...
> I hadn’t had to chase down a crash, or some weird multi-threaded race condition, or some of these other things which actually consumed a huge amount of my time before.
(They say at InfluxDb)
That's not a Rust vs. Go slapfight? Instead, sounds like a good judgement to me
Us Node folks adapted typescript because we wanted static compiled types.
I wish TS had more of a runtime. The only thing I'm jealous of with regards to python is how seamlessly you can do JSON schema enforcement on HTTP endpoints. The Zod hoops are a constant source of irritation that only exists because the TS team is dogmatic.
I think Typescript is a perfectly cromulent language. I don't know it well but would seriously consider it for any problem that had a shape that admitted a dynamic language. There's a lot to be said for using dynamic languages, too!
Indeed, if I were proposing contributions to the Linux kernel, or any other kind of systems development, I'd probably be considering Rust. For backend services, the decision is between C# and Go (with the latter being the favourite).
I think I'd be ok with node via purescript? But in general I think rust and go people should join forces against the evils of dynamic typing. Isn't type hinting finally considered best practice now? I think that is effectively an admission that it was a defect. And even with good ginting it is still worse than inference. Inference can let plenty of code go untouched on type changes, while still protecting against unindended type changes.
Right, so you don't need a large portion of Go's runtime benefits, because you have a far better version of it already, zero cost abstractions and TRUE memory safety, not pretend memory safety behind a -race detector with zero compiler guarantees...
> the Rust vs. Go consideration boils down almost completely to "do you want a managed runtime or not".
That's not really something I care much about. My beefs with Go are 90% about the syntax of the language itself, and it's weak (compared to Rust) type system.
When it comes to a managed runtime, for most tasks, I generally don't care if my language has one or not. For some tasks I do, but there are not many of those tasks, and so this question is mostly irrelevant to me when deciding Go vs. Rust.
I don't really get where you're seeing that the predominant Go vs. Rust debate is about the runtime. IME it's the subjective stuff about the languages themselves, and their ecosystems and communities.
> The Rust vs. Go slapfight is a weird and cringe backwater of our field.
::shrug:: I dunno, I mostly stay out of it and just use Rust, and I'm happy and avoid the drama. I've written a little Go here and there, didn't really like it, and moved on.
I think people do this for every language. It becomes a part of their identity, and then they have to defend it. I used to do that too, long ago, but I don't have the time or energy for it for the most part, and find it boring, so that $LANG-user-as-identity bit of my has fallen by the wayside.
I don't think it's about adoption levels; sure Go and Rust are tiny compared to JS/python/etc. It's emotional, not about who has the most users or who can even plausibly get there.
In some sense this is the same as the NIMBY/YIMBY question. There are perfectly valid reasons to want to live like Spacers do on Aurora, yet many prefer the caves.
It feels like you’re upset because your favorite language has objective flaws that people are pointing out. You’re also trying to minimize people’s lived experiences and pleading with them to stop pointing the flaws out.
Sure, Go is better than Python in some things. But developers deserve the best. We deserve not to have to deal with Go’s quirks, idiosyncrasies and design mistakes.
This is probably going to sound generic / repetitive, but my biggest complaint about Rust is the package management situation, which is entirely the result of the developer mindset. I love the ergonomics on the rust side (the functional approach to data types is beautiful), but I’m working on two projects side by side, one in rust and one in go at the moment. The dependency trees are entirely different beasts, with most of the stuff on the go project covered by the stdlib whereas I think the rust project is over 400 despite asking for just rusqlite (sqlite), clap (cli), ratatui (tui), and tauri (gui), the last of which is by far the worst offender but even without it, it’s still close on 100 which is crazy. If there were (and maybe there are, I just haven’t found them) decently maintained alternatives to the rust crates that actually have a sane dependency approach, I’d feel much better. I’m just trying to not shai hulud my system, and the rust-web people seem to want to turn cargo into npm in that regard.
Note that many Rust libraries consist of multiple crates, which all end up in the dependency graph. This makes the number of dependencies seem higher than it actually is: the separate crates have the same maintainers and are often part of the same upstream git repo.
I agree with the general sentiment though. Rust also has a lot of crates that are stuck semi-unmaintained at some 0.x version, often with no better alternative.
Unfortunately the 0.x version has pervaded because of community cargo culting claiming that versioning is easier with 0.x than with major version numbers > 0. Personally I find that hard to believe, especially given packages like Tokio and anyhow (still at v1) make it work and there’s others that are >v1.
That is to say 0.x doesn’t necessarily mean unmaintained, it can also mean “I don’t want to have to think about how to version APIs / make guarantees about APIs). Eg reqwest is very widely used and actively maintained yet is still at v0.13.
> claiming that versioning is easier with 0.x than with major version numbers > 0
I think it's less that versioning is claimed to be easier with 0.x versions, and more that some people have got into their heads that 1.0 signals either "permanently stable" or "no new versions for several years" and they don't want to commit to that yet.
I do wish more crates would 1.0 (and then 2.0, etc).
There is good reasons to break out projects into multiple crates. It makes reusing functionality elsewhere easier. It makes it easier to reason about behavior. It makes it easier for LLMs to understand (either working within the crate or consuming as an api surface.) So you end up with projects that have multiple crates inside the same workspace and it really blows up dependency count.
The other very important reason for splitting into crates is compile times. Crates are the "compilation unit" and you often get more build paralellism with more crates.
To highlight the problem for Python: Python's standard library has getopt, optparse, and now argparse. I don't think they set out to offer 3 argument parsing libs, one of which is marked superseded, but here we are.
At least in the case of sqlite, rusqlite pulled in 5 or so in total whereas Go had a single library that was a thin wrapper around sqlite, and integrated into the stdlib interface. Many fewer deps
Edit: counts are fair, that’s still hundreds unaccounted
Package management is the bane of nearly every language/technology
Nobody has "solved" it, and I don't think that there will ever be one (never say never, though, right?)
For Go we rely on developers of libraries to adhere to the semver versioning scheme accurately, and we cannot "pin" versions (a personal bugbear of mine)
There is a couple of workarounds - using SHAs not unlike the git commit hash to provide a pseudo version, and, vendoring (which is a cache of known dependencies - which brings with it cache management problems)
I had the misfortune of having to use Python with a virtual env on the weekend - it did not end well, and reminded me why I migrated away from Python.
Look at
Perl (cpan)
Java (maven, gradle)
Ruby (gems)
Go (dep, glide, vgo, modules)
Rust (cargo)
Node (npm, yarn, etc)
OSes too
Redhat (yum, rpm, etc)
Debian (apt)
Ubuntu (snap - god why????)
> I had the misfortune of having to use Python with a virtual env on the weekend - it did not end well, and reminded me why I migrated away from Python.
I see this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't match my experience at all.
In my decade-old bubble of using Python professionally, I've never had an issue with virtualenvs. The few issues I might've had with dependency resolution must be so far in the past that I don't remember. But that's not strictly about virtualenvs. Likewise, pip could be clunky, but we don't have to deal with it anymore.
My niche is mostly backend. Other Python niches must be considerably worse in this regard.
Actually with Go modules you are always pinning dependencies. What’s in your go.mod is what is used. If your go.mod needs to be updated because a dependency wants to bring in a newer version of a transient dependency, the go.mod has to be modified (by the go command, not by you)
It did and didn't. Nix tools for building language-specific packages almost always wrap the language build tool/package manager. This can be easy or hard, depending on how onerous the build tool is for vendoring libraries.
What Nix and build tools need to agree on is a specification or protocol for "building a software dependency tree". Like, I should be able to say 'builder = cargo' in a Nix derivation and Cargo should be able to pick up everything it needs from the build environment. Alas, there is simply far too much tied up in nixpkg's stdenv for this to be viable, so we have magic stdenv builder behavior via hooks when a build tool is included in nativeBuildInputs.
I think one of the key problems too is that a system level dependency is managed by people dedicated to ensuring the chaotic nature of the package they are responsible for conforms to the way the OS they are maintaining for has proscribed.
There's no real way to do that at a language level - we cannot have "Go has determined the package you are trying to fix has not met the versioning requirements proscribed so you cannot submit the patch to fix it"
What language dependencies do is what OSes would think of as "unofficial versioning" that is, an OS will let you install and run an unofficial version of some lib (we've all been there, right, multiple versions of some core library because one doesn't work with whatever you are trying to install), but they will not manage it at all.
That's an interesting viewpoint, but one I've noticed is less prevalent in other languages.
The c# guys at microsoft created an enormous stdlib, and the overwhelming majority of it is pretty good. The outliers being of course older stuff they've never really had time to upgrade. And they don't seem to be afraid to deprecate stuff, every major version brings a couple of minor breaking changes. But it all seems to work out just fine somehow
I’d argue that this is wrong. Having a conservative standard library that aims to contain most things most people need is preferable to third party libraries in 90%. For the 10% that isn’t covered to your liking by the standard library you can turn to third parties. You get both a practical standard library and third party options.
I did a lot of cryptography over the past couple of years. Go has that in the standard library. For the last decade and a half cryptography is something that every developer has to deal with at some point, and it NOT being the awful pain that it is in just about any other language, is a good thing. Sure, it does not contain every algorithm and mechanism in the world, but it contains everything you need for 90% of cases. That means that most of the time you don’t have to do the extra work of ensuring you have an out if the library you depend on should go away/bad, bugs will be fixed, people speak a common language and you don’t have to do twice the work in terms of risk assessment.
People keep forgetting that you have to evaluate these things in the real world. In practical real-world situations. The real world is not about what works in theory but what actually provides value for actual people working on actual projects.
The problem is that trust shouldn't be so binary. We should have ways to increase trust without needing to resort to the standard library. There was an effort to do this at some point in rust but the idea was sadly not well received. Maybe it'll end up reviving itself with modern supply chain concerns.
The idea is that there could form some groups of well maintained crates that only depend on each other and have a similar amount of oversight. This actually naturally happens in c++ because grabbing dependencies is so painful, but it makes dependencies more trustworthy. For instance boost, absl, folly, etc.
I've harped on this for years, but few devs seem to grasp the concept that less dependencies is better than more. Especially library authors.
It's only now that the supply chain problems with npm are becoming beyond obvious that we are seeing devs come around to this notion (leftpad should have been the canary in the coal mine).
The javascript ecosystem has corrupted far too many other programming ecosystems. The notion of "just make a small package like is-even" is really the core of the problem. But also people making libraries often have the wrong mentality about that process. They think of it like they are making an application (So why not just pull in a bunch of random deps). Every dependency a library brings in should have a serious conversation and analysis on "how much work would it be to just do this functionality here". And if it's not that much, then preference should be to duplicate, not depend.
If you look at the number of authors vs the number of dependencies the gap narrows but doesn't disappear. Many of the most commonly used crates are written by members of the rust foundation amd are used in the tools themselves. But it is always a concern. I'm looking forward to the upcoming option to forbid versions newer than N days at the project level. But just manually only y updating versions when you need a new feature or there is a cve works pretty well.
The stdlib isn't necessarily better, but it's always there. To use Python as an example, I tend to prefer requests to urllib2, as do most programmers. But I've absolutely been in scenarios where all I could get was the stdlib, and having urllib2 saved my ass. I think it's extremely important for the stdlib to be batteries included, even if they aren't the best versions of those batteries on the market.
Why is it worse to import a number of other packages that provide exactly the functionality you need, than to have a large standard library that provides some but not all of the functionality you need, requiring you to still use some large dependencies?
LLM writing tells are getting more subtle, but they still jump off the page for me, in particular the word "genuine:"
"This is the area where Go genuinely shines, and it’s worth being precise about why"
"the lack of GC pauses is a genuine selling point"
"Humans are genuinely bad at reasoning about memory"
"There are cases where the borrow checker is genuinely too strict"
tbc I don't think the article was fully AI-generated, just AI-assisted. If so, the author did a genuinely good job of it! No one else is commenting on it, so clearly it didn't detract much from the substance. It's just weird that this is becoming increasingly common, and increasingly hard to detect.
I don't know about the author's background, but there is now a generation of non-native programmers who learned to write English by using LLMs for corrections (yeah including this comment).
The irony is that studies show LLM detectors have a much higher false-positive rate for non-native speakers [1]. If most of what you read stems from LLMs, you end up writing like an LLM.
> but there is now a generation of non-native programmers who learned to write English by using LLMs for corrections (yeah including this comment)
LLM writing has not been overly abundant for more than a couple years. I don't know where you got the idea that an entire generation of people have already learned to write like an LLM.
Perhaps more people are using AI as part of an editorial process that is largely driven by what they wish to convey but where they have stopped fighting the AI on its preferred style. It’s supremely annoying when AI updates your prose with its own formulation despite plenty of instructions otherwise. Too often AIs mangle meaning which can be especially worrisome as it’s not easy to catch subtle word/grammar changes that dramatically shift meaning. Overall though, defects aside, for me, and only very recently, it’s been more helpful than not. I think AIs will continue to improve in this regard and be better editorial partners. For competent writings, it won’t replace human authorship or expert review.
Specifically, I’ve recently used ChatGPT for legal/administrative writing where the AI seems to be trained on a large corpus and seems to know the conventions and vocabulary well; a lawyer who reviewed the work had important corrections. Before AI, I would have sought model filings and have had less success at emulating the genre. So it’s lowered time/cost somewhat but it takes lots of diligence. By default, current AI outputs seems intelligible but are still really far off the mark. I’ve found a structured interview is a good way to start rather than jumping into draft generation.
I have to agree here, but I'm not sure why. I don't have any clue what makes something sound AI generated or not. I got to about here "Go is clearly working for a lot of people," -- before I became suspicious that it was AI-assisted (but also maybe I'm wrong and it's not AI-assisted, I am very bad at telling). It's more about vibes (ironically) than anything else in particular. If something "sounds" AI-assisted then I instantly lose interest even if the article itself is otherwise fine. I wish people were more ok with writing their own thoughts with how it comes to them.
Agreed. In fact, one of the things I now watch for is my mind starting to "slide off" the text, or finding myself re-reading a section multiple times. It's like the brain subconsciously recognizes a lack of substance even if we can't point to a specific tell.
Author here. I use the term 'genuinely' too often, but that's just me. I do that when speaking here as well. Suffice to say that I'm not a native speaker, so that might have something to do with it. I will go over the text and replace some of those. thx.
And it’s a good contrast with ‘just fcking use Go’ article he linked.
Go article is much more human. I love that and would choose a human centered language and human centered culture over LLM-centered everything every time
the psychosis has gone off the charts! anything that sounds odd to someone can now be labelled as an LLM text "smell"?
why scoff over someone doing assisted writing? i might age myself but kids back in the day would try to sound better by using synonym feature in ms word (or through web thesaurus) for their assignment essays. this all looks familiar to the same practice, now only made more accessible.
There's nothing in the comment you're replying to that could be described as "scoffing." What are you on about?
I feel the opposite, where AI hype is so extreme that merely someone pointing out an article may have had LLM involvement prompts a response like this. Someone incredulously painting people as ivory tower nose thumbers. If anything, it pushes me away from LLM writing more.
I also don't see how you can compare finding a synonym for a word to having your entire writing voice determined for you.
I also wonder if it's possible that this is just "blog-speak"
The author of this article has what seems like it could be a relatively thriving consulting business, so he probably writes more to advertise his services than anything else. That kind of writing surely lends itself to a particular writing style, which is a non-insignificant chunk of the kind of writing that LLMs were trained on.
While reading the article, I remember feeling that I'm reading an LLM generated sentence a few times, but in general, this specific article look like an example of acceptable LLM usage to me. I wouldn't call it "AI slop".
It is, if I may say that, _genuinely_ hard to use LLM assist and not make the text look like LLM generated. Even when I write an email in gmail and it gives its suggestions to make the text better, each one individually makes perfect sense, but when I click a few of them, the whole email now looks like AI slop, so I would normally undo the changes, going back to my imperfect hand-written non-optimized version.
I think the whole post is AI generated. The author could have given a draft as input and perhaps edited the output in a few places.
Take this paragraph as example:
> Go got generics in 1.18, and they’re useful, but the implementation has constraints (no methods with type parameters, GC shape stenciling, occasional surprising performance characteristics). Rust generics monomorphize, each instantiation produces specialized code with zero runtime cost. Combined with traits, this gives you real zero-cost abstractions.
Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. I would expect that kind of writing from very specialized books or papers, not from a blog post. Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
> Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. [...] Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
I actually prefer that style of writing! (When it's not AI-generated ofc.) And I also try to use it in my technical blog posts. I usually re-read my drafts asking myself: "Does the reader actually care about this? Is this sentence adding something or is it just fluff?"
And actually I feel like AI text usually produces more fluff, or anyway I notice it more, but I see how it can make the result "robotic and boring".
His stuff about generics in Go is also wrong. He says that Go's standard library "avoids" them. He forgot that it has `slices.SortFunc()`. He forgot about Go `Seq`. Maybe because he has stopped using Go and is no longer that familiar.
I've noticed LLM writing over the past year has had an unusually high tendency to talk about surfaces and, in particular, substrates. I don't expect LLM generated text to be anything other than rich with clichés. I simply wish we would all demonstrate a better editorial hand so we weren't reading the same voice, over and over.
I already use Rust and don't have experience with Go, so this article maybe isn't super for me.
I do have one nitpick though: Stating that data races are "caught at compile time" in Rust feels like it is overstating the case, at least a little. It sounds a bit like its implying Rust can also handle things like mutual lock starvation, or other concurrency issues. When that's simply not the case. I know "data race" is technically a formal term, with a decently narrow scope, yet I still think it could be a bit clearer about it.
Being able to just return {}, err when returning an empty struct from a function sounds really exciting and encouraging to use pointers less, which is really good for nil safety if anything
I know general consensus on this is that it is good, but I hate this. The fact that both assignments do completely different things (with the map one doing heap allocs!) is insane. This would've been much better if it only allowed for anonymous structs.
var A string = "A"
type Foo struct { A string }
var a Foo
var b map[string]string
a = {A: "abc"}
b = {A: "abc"}
If you have a green field, by all means write it in rust. If you have a brown field, and a functional profitable system, rewrite the parts that need rewriting in the original language, whatever that is, and carry on. Make your systems better in small measurable ways, with the language you know and a team you trust to implement it all. Anything else is a wasteful religious argument.
If anyone one comes and tells me we need to rewrite in a new language from any of those modern languages, other than you are dealing with something cannot wait for GC.
That is a signal that person is lacking purpose in their job or life.
I liked Rust before running a benchmark, but the gap between how effectively most LLMs write in Rust vs Go was still surprisingly large to me (especially in agentic harnesses where they can fix the initial environment issues). I've become a pretty big Rust evangelist after seeing that. We've had a lot of success writing batch processing tools in Rust to be called by our existing codebase, but haven't attempted a full production migration... yet.
I will say that many of the issues with Go in the article, especially re: nil handling are increasingly solved by thorough coding reviews with Codex. Better to not have the issue in the first place, sure, but these kinds of security bugs are becoming optional to developers who put in at least as much effort to review and understand code as they put into the initial design and execution.
The detailed compiler errors and strong type system makes the change -> compile -> change loop simple for agents to handle. Rust provides very strong rails it forces users on to. Codex always manages to get something to compile.
The downside is that maybe it should fail sometimes when an idiomatic approach isn’t viable… instead it will implement something stupid that compiles and meets the request.
The weakness of Rust WRT LLMs is compilation times. LLMs code faster and hence spend relatively more time waiting for compilation than humans do, so on reasonably sized projects (e.g. 100k+ lines) Rust's ~10x slower compilation starts showing up as a bottleneck. If you're writing some critical infrastructure it makes sense to pay that cost, but if you're writing some internal service that's not publicly exposed to the internet then development velocity may be a bigger concern. (I'd argue that slow compilation also influences human development velocity, but for some reason developers very rarely try to quantify this.)
>The weakness of Rust WRT LLMs is compilation times.
That's a more tractable problem then basically anything else around LLMs and programming. We're definitely getting more cores in the avg machine judging by roadmaps & leaks
For cli tools, game engines, etc. certainly so. But what about monoliths? Do we have enough data to say Rust handles long-running monolith apps exposing web and other network services better than the JVM with its hot spot? I haven’t come to any stats on that matter, yet.
If you can encode your request processing patterns in statically sized types, then you can get the same high-level memory allocation behavior on both platforms. Arguably Rust makes this a bit easier. (Though I have no idea how much of the concepts of mechanical sympathy made it to mainstream Java.)
If you have some kind of super vague complicated patchwork of plugins that all contribute to processing, then the JVM seems to be the more convenient choice.
Indirect evidence, but parts of AWS and cloudflare have been running Rust in production for close to a decade now and neither company looks to be itching to move services back to Java.
> other network services better than the JVM with its hot spot?
JVM hotspot optimization is just band-aid for something Rust does always everywhere naturally? Assuming that you use lifetimes etc properly and not going to Arc rampage.
I would be careful with this benchmark even thought it shows JIT efficiency. This is a special case which might not really reflect realworld - string was static? What if you use random string?
> You literally cannot dereference an Option without acknowledging the None case. Whole categories of pager-duty incidents disappear.
This is at the very least misleading, given that you can use unwrap.
Regarding error handling: will a parser error in the config return an error that includes the name of the file that’s failed to parse? That’s the kind of useful context that I add to errors in Go.
The difference is, unwrap will stick out like a sore thumb, and it’s opt-in. You explicitly tell "this may panic".
As for error handling, this kind of enrichment is usually left to the caller (that is, the end application), with error libraries like anyhow where you can add arbitrary string contexts to an error. You would end up writing `Config::load(path).with_context(|| format!("Failed to load configuration file {path}"))?`.
I have to come to believe that Go is simple for the compiler, not necessarily for the programmer.
`nil` is not simpler than references and Option<T>. lack of enum is complicating my code. automatic type promotion is a hidden bug waiting to happen and preventing proper strong types, lack of `?` is making things verbose. struct tags look simple, until you realize they are hiding a ton of code and creating a ton of corner cases that you still have to manually check, and are completely nonstandard (hello json and `default`, `omitempty/omitzero` etc...). `nil` and interfaces? it took decades to recognize that Generics simplify things for the programmer, no Send/Sync like in rust makes concurrent code more error prone, etc, etc...
And that is without talking about the standard library, where "simple" somehow becomes having `url.Parse` that accepts everything without errors. http body `nil` vs `NoBody`. Who hasn't had to write the Nth implementation of a pipe between reader and writer? Apparently most libraries hear "simple" and think "dumb". We could go on for hours.
Golang is much easier to learn, and rust does remain much more complicated. I don't thing golang hit his target of "simplicity" honestly.
Not sure the article is … accurate? Go has a large standard library. Rust leans on third party cargo libraries which fall into the supply chain attack and has a small standard library. Anyways, that feels immediately biased in the article. Also 11% use Rust? I don’t see that penetration in real long term products. Sure lots of tui apps these days but not things that you can make money working on.
These percentages are from the JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem Report 2024 on the question "Which programming languages have you used in the last 12 months?"[0].
I think a better datapoint would be the "Primary Programming Languages" in the 2025 report[1] where Rust sits at 4% and Go at 8%.
Quite new to Go, so sorry in advance for a stupid question:
> "Go got generics in 1.18 (March 2022), thirteen years after the language shipped. They are useful, but they feel tacked on, and in practice they have most of the downsides of a generic type system without delivering the upsides you’d expect coming from Rust, Haskell, or even modern C++."
The problems with Go generics have now largely been solved, haven't they? Is this comment from the author still applicable?
That's the thing, a programming language is not something static, it evolves.
For instance, people are working on adding generic methods for the next release cycles.
And what the article complains about is by design, not a bug. It is a tradeoff made to avoid bloat.
In any case, given the future possibilities, I'd bet on Go.
If anything, the language is just slower to evolve because every language change means the tooling needs to catch up. And now llms would have to catch up.
ChatGPT is still using Go 1.23 for instance...
> There’s no built-in goroutine-style preemption. Long CPU-bound work in an async task starves the executor; you offload to tokio::task::spawn_blocking or rayon instead.
I don't know why anyone uses spawn_blocking for CPU-bound tasks. It's clearly designed for blocking IO tasks. There's a reason why Erlang cordons them separately into Dirty CPU and Dirty IO schedulers.
Which in turn relies on a stack largely written in, shock and horror, C, such as the Linux kernel, libc, openssl, nginx, etc. etc.
Even if you believe language X to be the bees knees, are you going to stop using it until everything below it in the computing stack has been rewritten in X? Of course not.
i like go because it's simple and just works. i like the error handling, if err != nil return err, i like the philosophy to focus using stdlib instead choose which libraries are the best for doing x. i like how go handle the concurrency like using channel or sync.waitgroup. i am very biased but someday i will also learn rust
I do like using Rust quite a bit, but the presence of arbitrary build-time code in build.rs is very risky until we get better at implementing dev-time sandboxing.
I would add that Rust also has naming guidelines and sticking to them removes or at least minimizes the occurrence of another common topic of discussions on PRs/reviews.
In the article, if you were to mention & follow them GetUser() in Go becomes user() in Rust[1], not get_user().
perhaps the oncall is better if you write your own services, but as an SRE / ops person who has to run other people's services, rust ones just generally seem to be worse: logs that are so verbose but seem to tell you nothing, statsd seems to be the only choice for metrics, contextless errors everywhere, memory "leaks" (more like runaway memory use) that the developers swear are impossible because it's rust, overall just less mature across services written by both in house and oss teams
I was a Go engineer for years and have shipped a lot of Go. I never properly learned Rust.
Over the past year I've been using AI to write small Rust tools for myself — I barely read the code, and honestly it just works.
But for serious projects I expect to maintain long-term, I still pick Go. Today I want code I can actually own and reason about myself.
Give it a year or two and I probably won't be writing code by hand at all. Once the AI owns the code anyway, that reason disappears — and at that point Rust's guarantees win. So I suspect I'll end up leaning Rust.
> But for serious projects I expect to maintain long-term, I still pick Go.
Maintenance is a big win for Go imho - that you can go to code you wrote a year or more ago - and jump right back into it, with little-to-no re-learning curve. The syntax is not providing cover for complexity bombs, and the tools keep the workflow simple and quick.
How is it with Rust ? Does one's own old code remain maintainable ?
Very nice write up! I am a fan of Rust and have little exposure to Go. That said, a couple of very minor points:
cargo audit is not built-in, it is 3rd party. (The comparison table near the top isn't clear about that, and the following text stating more is built-in for Rust than for Go might be confusing. I would suggest adding an asterisk to mark built-ins in that table.)
cargo watch has been in "maintenance mode" for some time. The author of that suggests cargo bacon instead.
I would think that you might have a better time going from go to zig. You would have to provide a pattern for implementing the interface model go uses.
Golang is an amazing runtime with a bad language, one that conflates simple with easy. I view it the same way I view Java: a fine choice for a corporation, but nothing to love. Although Java’s gotten a lot better lately.
It is also easier to make your code deterministic with Rust vs with Go, which is incredibly useful if you need to perform deterministic simulation testing + property-based testing. I recently wrote a Postgres-to-Iceberg data mirroring tool [1] in Go, but I ported it to Rust because I wanted the ability perform DST without fighting Go's runtime [2]. But if the domain is not critical that warrants DST, I would still pick Go over Rust any day.
Anybody who actually moved a set of services from Go to Rust? I've heard that in practice Rust uses more memory than Go for web services. When I ask LLMs I get the same answer as in the article. A 30-50% reduction but then also claims on how much memory Go uses. Which is about 5-10x more than our average service use.
A lot of libs/packages in Go's stdlib also has this problem. They like to package everything in a very tight interface (very obvious example includes crypto/* and http), without exposing implementation detail to the end user.
Doing this of course has it's benefits, but if the feature provided by the stdlib slightly don't fit you needs, then you might have to write your own (potentially unsafe and/or less performant) one from zero.
Rust is great overall, but there's some oddities. For example their lib.rs / `mod` is very, very unintuitive, it felt overdesigned and unnecessarily complex (just see [their book]). I like what Go or Java did to their lib/package systems, it's much better that way.
I've come to hate hiding internals. Put them in a namespace which makes it clear there's no API stability guarantees, but make them available if needed.
As you note it's just pain with no gain to properly hide them. Users can't readily work around bugs or extend functionality.
I've swinged between Go and Rust for my personal projects multiple times. For work, it is decided by the management so not my problem.
The biggest gripe I have with Go is the lack of *any* compile time check for mutex. Even C++ has extensions like ABSL_GUARDED_BY. For a language so proud on concurrency, it is strange not to have any guardrails.
Channels are not for everything. Plenty of mutex cases cannot be rewritten as channels, or will be very unwieldy so. In fact, every large Go project I have seen uses mutex here or there.
Theoretically you can use channels to simulate a mutex, but I agree with you there are use cases where a mutex makes more sense. They are even used in the standard library, for instance to implement sync.Once.
But generally I would agree that if you need to code parallel execution, channels are a good way to do it, because you can avoid race conditions if you share data only over channels. The biggest problem is that a lot of people don't understand, that channels with a buffer larger than 1 are a sign of problems in the architecture.
There is a type of parallel programming with workers for specific functions, that always leads to performance issues. The problem is you need to right-guess the distribution of work, when you have to define the amount of workers for a specific function. At least one go routine for one request is a much better approach than function-specific workers.
Go has warts, but projects like Lisette (https://lisette.run/) try to fix those. Go has bare syntax, as lack some (modern?) features. But imho it has a superb runtime, eg has a WAY better concurrency story than what you see in Rust.
The "when to enforce it" framing is what sticks with me. Go and Rust agree on safety, concurrency, simple deployment, but Go says "catch it in review" and Rust says "catch it before it compiles." The right answer depends entirely on how expensive a production incident is for you vs. how expensive slower iteration is.
Some folks already dropped rust and went with zig. Honestly, to me it seems only devs at the peak density of the programming bell curve, are the ones arguing about “the better” programming language.
Go has shorter and more predictable GC pauses. If a reference count drops to zero in Rust, it may take an unbounded time to free all the things it refers to (recursively if necessary).
I still think rustfmt made a mistake by going with four spaces. It's basically inferior for everything except forcing everyone to use the same indentation width, which is actually a downside, since I constantly encounter two-space indent codebases that I can't read and also can't change to four spaces because it's not tabs. Also translating spaces to tabs visually is undecidable thanks to alignment, while the inverse is not true. Ugh.
Yep, but because it's not the default, plenty of ecosystem tooling just does not properly track the two separate types of leading whitespace (indentation vs alignment) and will happily conflate every tab_width characters of alignment with an indentation level (which is grossly incorrect). I don't have an example off the top of my head because I run very far each time it happens.
>Go developers don’t usually come to Rust because Go is “too slow.” For most backend workloads, Go is plenty fast. People are generally a bit frustrated with Go’s verbose error handling, the danger of segmentation faults from nil pointers, and the lack of generics (for a long time) or any sophisticated type system features, such as enums or traits. Interfaces are not a worthy replacement for traits, and the Go standard library has some weird gaps, such as the lack of a Set type. (The idiomatic workaround is map[T]struct{}, which works fine in practice but is a tell that the type system isn’t quite carrying its weight.)
If those are issues, I rather use C#/.NET than expose both developers and AI agents to a cognitive overload.
However, those are not big issues to me, and at least in the present day, Go seems to excel at the things it is supposed to: backend and microservices.
Sure, you can find some small issues with Go if you are really nitpicking, but you can find bigger issues with other languages. Sure, Go is boring as f..k, but I don't care and the agents don't mind, they love Go. Most people prefer reading Go than reading Rust. Go allows a fast way to production and for many startups and small companies, that matters a lot.
I don't hate Rust, and even use it - for where I think it makes sense, but for backend and microservices, Go seems a better fit.
As always, this is an opinion, derived from my personal experience, take it with a grain of salt, your experience might be different.
The article seems to be just a way to say "Rust is better" - and it fails to do so by spreading misinformation such as the channels part (https://corrode.dev/learn/migration-guides/go-to-rust/#chann...) or making a fair comparison of pprof vs Rust's flamegraph.
It also skips entirely over debugging (delve vs gdb), IDE support, ecosystem (why the hell does Rust have N async runtimes?!), statically linking and so on.
A comparison between the performance of RLS / rust-analyzer (painfully slow) and gopls would be enough to kill the whole argument about developer happiness and productivity.
It even passes traits as a "reason to switch" to Rust - where in fact it would probably be a reason (IMHO) not to use it (together with lifetimes).
I think both languages are amazing, so a migration Go -> Rust (or Rust -> Go) makes no sense most of the time.
I've written code in both for a while now, so I know the pain and advantages of both.
For example, Go sucks at microcontroller stuff - in fact it's not even Go officially (see my presentation about porting "Go" to an ESP32-S3 [1]) - whereas Rust is amazing and even has a strong project behind (https://esp.rs) and amazing tooling (probe-rs & co).
What's also not addressed here is the Go ecosystem. The Go packages are one `go mod add` away (pkgs.go.dev) and the module owner guarantees v1 backwards compatibility for the whole lifetime of the module. This means that, no matter what happens, your dependencies will always be up-to-date with no migration struggle. This makes creating stuff for anything around the Kubernets ecosystem a breeze, you can literally import the types from another project and start your integration right away.
All in all, it's not a fair comparison and it's very biased (which is fair) - at the same time I think the idea behind the article is "wrong". If you find yourself migrating from Go to Rust (or vice versa), you're likely doing something wrong - and the performance gain is not the reason you're really doing it for.
Rust is great. However in an agentic world go will win. Look no further than incremental build times. This, combined with high token costs mean that for a given application it simply will cost more to to write it in Rust than Go.
This can easily be justified for many usecases, but for your vanilla crud app, do you really need Rust?
Per the article, you are getting 20-50% better more performance with Rust. Not worth it unless your team was already fluent in Rust. Now consider a scenario where your team uses AI exclusively to code, now you are spending more time and tokens waiting around to consume large rust builds. As far as I know this is an inherent property of Rust to have its safety guarantees.
I think Rust makes sense for a lot of cases, but for a small web service, overkill and unnecessary imho. If someone ported their crud app from Go to Rust I would question their priorities.
Again I am speaking more in terms of software engineering economics than anything else. Yes, I know in a perfect world Rust binaries are smaller, performance is better and code more “correct”, but the world is hardly perfect. People have to push code quickly, iterate quickly. Teams have churn, Rust, frankly is alien for many, etc.
Because the agentic world involves the generation of so much code that gets harder to review, I would think the compile-time guarantees of Rust would make it a better option.
This is true if the token budget and time are not taken into account. In practice though, waiting minutes instead of seconds per build multiplied by prompt and again by change adds up very fast.
1.5s for a massive project, on a laptop,like the OP said is still barely anything in the context of agentic coding. It’s less than a single percentage point of the total time in the loop, even if the agent has to compile multiple times.
This is cope.
I do give you that rust is more verbose and thus more token heavy. However that verbosity is meaningful and the LLM would have to spend tokens thinking about the code to understand less verbose languages. So I’d consider that a wash - in some cases it hurts and in some it helps.
We don’t know how massive the project is, but in any case building and immediately building again of course will be fast. How fast is it if all files have a single line changed, for example refactoring a log message?
Not to mention we haven't even gotten to discussing tests.
My point is that it isn't necessarily that fast. It is relative to the amount of changes and where they were made. For a fair comparison you would also have to present the worst case incremental build time which approaches the full build time (this goes for Go too), which per your own example is nearly a minute for rust.
> For a fair comparison you would also have to present the worst case incremental build time which approaches the full build time (this goes for Go too)
The worst case that would approach a non-incremental build time would be if you were editing a leaf crate. But in almost all cases the leaf crates are 3rd-party dependencies that you would never edit directly.
A real-world worst case is probably more like ~10-20% of an non-incremental builds.
Can you clarify how you're spending tokens on waiting? My understanding is that the LLM isn't actually necessarily doing anything while a build runs. The whole process end to end may take longer for sure (ignoring things like the compiler catching more errors, that's really hard to factor in) but how does that correlate to more tokens?
> The whole process end to end may take longer for sure (ignoring things like the compiler catching more errors, that's really hard to factor in) but how does that correlate to more tokens?
This. rust emits more information both in its output and the syntax itself more complicated requires more tokens.
Of course, there's plenty of bugs in Rust code still. The fact that safe Rust should be able to statically guarantee entire classes of bugs like data races are impossible is a huge deal, though. We're totally free to have different values when it comes to what matters, but compile time and a verbose toolchain are not high costs for that, to me. I personally would first consider other things like the cognitive overhead of learning to work with the borrow checker.
> As far as I know this is an inherent property of Rust to have its safety guarantees.
From what I've seen, Rust's strictness is actually a huge win for LLMs, as they get much better feedback on what's wrong with the code. Things like null checking that would be a runtime error in Go are implied by the types / evident in the syntax in Rust.
Go is more verbose, but Rust have more complex syntax which in practice require more tokens.
The big thing though is because builds are slower, you will end up waiting longer as tests are modified, rebuilt and run. This difference piles up fast.
As someone with a background of consulting in the Stockholm based gaming industry for the last decade+, I have to respectfully disagree. Nearly everyone I know is very much on the hype train. And for good reason too! The capabilities are undeniable!
Oh yeah, definitely. There has indeed been a lot of hype overestimating the capabilities. People thinking you can one-shot big complex applications with a few paragraphs of descriptions for example. There has also been a lot of anti-hype, or whatever you call it when people seem to believe LLMs don't provide any value for software Dev, basically writing all capabilities off as pure hype.
The truth of course is somewhere in the middle.
It's difficult to tell what people mean when they say hype sometimes.
The capabilities are very much deniable. They do not exist. Using LLMs to write code is either going to make you slower (as you have to review all that code), or make your software suck (because they write bad code and you're choosing to not review it). There's no actual win to be had here.
I could see migrating from C or C++ or Python to Rust, for various reasons, but for web back-end work Go is a good match. I write almost entirely in Rust, but the last time I had to do something web server side in Rust, I now wish I'd used Go.
The OP points out the wordyness of Go's error syntax. That's a good point. Rust started with the same problem, and added the "?" syntax, which just does a return with an error value on errors. Most Go error handling is exactly that, written out. Rust lacks a uniform error type. Rust has three main error systems (io::Error, thiserror, and anyhow), which is a pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls.
(There are a number of things which tend to be left out of new languages and are a pain to retrofit, because there will be nearly identical but incompatible versions. Constant types. Boolean types. Error types. Multidimensional array types. Vector and matrix types of size 2, 3, and 4 with their usual operations. If those are not standardized early, programs will spend much time fussing with multiple representations of the same thing. Except for error handling, these issues do not affect web dev much, but they are a huge pain for numerical work, graphics, and modeling, where standard operations are applied to arrays of numbers.)
Go has two main advantages for web services. First, goroutines, as the OP points out. Second, libraries, which the OP doesn't mention much. Go has libraries for most of the things a web service might need, and they are the ones Google uses internally. So they've survived in very heavily used environments. Even the obscure cases are heavily used. This is not true of Rust's crates, which are less mature and often don't have formal QA support.
> Rust has three main error systems (io::Error, thiserror, and anyhow), which is a pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls
anyhow explicitly isn't designed for what you are trying to do here. It's designed to be the last link in the chain (and complementary to thiserror, not in competition). If you are using anyhow any deeper than your top-level binary crate, you are likely to be in for an unpleasant time.
He was talking about the chain of function calls not crates. You still have that in your top level crate.
I love Go and used to write it heavily for anything non LLM based.
Now that we have agentic coding I just write everything in Rust and couldn’t be happier. The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers. Now that we have agentic coding I’m not sure Go’s value prop holds up anymore
My rust services have been nothing short of amazing from a performance and reliability perspective
In my experience LLMs (I speak mainly of Claude Code & Cursor) write very poor quality Rust.
They treat it like it's JavaScript, falling back to using String/&str needlessly instead of making new types. They do ugly `static Mutex<Refcell<` a-la global JS variables for info sharing instead of working out the lifetimes to do it properly. It loves making functions infallible and then panic-ing within them and certainly I wouldn't use them for unsafe at all - they hallucinate safety comments which are in fact, totally unsound.
Of course these are all surmountable with an experienced developer to regularly step in and unfuck the code, but forcing them into 'harder' territory where every problem is not solved by a .clone() and an Arc<Mutex<>> means they will spend minutes 'thinking' about basic lifetime issues until I step in and add the missing `move` in a closure.
That is interesting. I make LLMs write C with the general hope that a simpler language they can manage well. That is not entirely true, though. They reason about C fluently indeed. The problem is, Claude pumps lots of bad C into the codebase if left unattended for 5 min. So, I need some clean-up passes afterwards to get to some acceptable quality level (both by LLMs and my own eyes). At which point, Claude sees the problem clearly, for some mysterious reason. Also, I use a C dialect heavly influenced by Go (slices, generics, no smart tricks, virtually no malloc).
LLMs generally write poor quality anything. It'll [usually] work, but it'll need massive refactoring to get in a maintainable and efficient state.
You gotta know how to write Rust (and general software arch) first. LLMs + Rust have been great for me.
"Write an SQL Repository with this interface"
Sweet - no need for SQLc or an ORM
same experience. any good claude skills to ease the pain?
Maybe true 6 months ago, but now it's better than any Rust Dev, as long as you guide it and not just let it rip on a full service/app unsupervised.
It's better than any Rust dev... as long as you guide it
What?
For me the bottleneck now is reading/reviewing code, not writing code. As you said, AI makes it way easier to write, but do you not review the code? And isn't a verbose, cryptic language with lots of nitty gritty memory management not harder to read/review?
I'm not sold on Rust being a great language to use with AI unless the reason to use it is a lot more than just Rust being fashionable.
I find Go harder to review than Rust.
The verbose error handling diluting the interesting parts is one thing, but the main issue is the weak type system. Having to read the callee's code to check if it deviates from `res xor err`, or if it mutates its arguments. Figuring out which interface that `func (o *Obj) ()` is implementing, if any. Dealing with documentation that is a wall of 100 disappointing oneliners all repeating the function name.
Rust is information-dense and takes longer to master, but it's not inherently cryptic, there's a finite amount of things to know. Memory management sometimes take a bit of thought to write, but it's straightforward to review, you can trust it's correct if it compiles, you just keep an eye out for optimizations.
I don't see the difference in exploring an dense custom type system versus a flatter one. Both force you to look things up when you don't know about them.
In my opinion these problems originate in architectural style. Much of the open source written today is designed to impress the audience instead of focusing on the problem.
In my experience, Rust is only mildly unpleasant to review, if only because the GitHub PR review interface is not an IDE. It can be hard to tell why .as_ref()s and whatnot had to be used without being able to hover over a variable to see its type. This is probably because of the language's preference for type inference, though personally I would rather that than having to skim over explicit types.
Compared to Rust, Go as a language requires a lot more effort to review. You have to be on the lookout for basic gotchas like not checking if a pointer is nil, placing `defer` in the wrong place, using a result when err isn't nil, and so on. Plus, diffs are messier because unused variables are a compilation error, and _, err := can change into _, err = solely due to new lines above.
And := not being = can really matter for variable shadowing.
Absolutely insane syntax choice in a language where everything returns 2 values. At least do var:, err: =
It's the same logic for human and for AI code: In Rust the compiler catches many bugs so you don't have to.
If the LLM gives you safe code you know there are entire classes of things you don't have to review for.
That said, I agree with you. My experience is that LLMs are great if you are highly competent in the domain in which you let them work. And it's probably easier to be competent in Go than in Rust.
Safe? No compiler is going to catch badly designed code, or intentionally backdoored code. Memory leaks as well. Compilers are the ground floor of validation and the least of your problems with AI generated code.
Yes? Does that contradict anything I said?
A mythical compiler might catch unsafe code
I found it's the opposite. Thanks to LLM's whole classes of problems otherwise solved by using Rust are gone. It's now more important that the generated code is easy to read.
The build time and space for rust is awful for fast iteration e.g change a thing, verify.
Reading the code? Who has the time.
Aah, I am sure the chickens of vibe coded origin, will never come to roost.
Time isn't the constraint here, but ability. Someone complaining about how hard Rust is to write is probably not capable of reviewing Rust code very well.
The usual reaction or opinion from e.g. good C++ programmers switching to Rust is that the added guardrails and expressivity are great and make things easier.
I find it easier to review Rust (but Go too) than to write it.
IMO neither Go nor Rust are great for reading/reviewing code.
Go is too verbose and the type system isn't expressive enough. Rust code is littered with little memory management details and it requires tons of third party libraries.
I think coding agents will eventually be able to get the low level details right on their own. Reviewers should be able to focus on architecture, design and logic mistakes.
I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.
> I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.
Let’s make that specification Turing complete while at it.
Jokes aside, IMO it will be a good natural progression. Specify the problem statement in LLM specification, generate the code in Go/Rust whatever is the language of your choice and review the generated code to make sure it adheres to the architecture/design principles that you have set.
It absolutely should be Turing complete. I want to formally specify some constraints/invariants that any generated code has to meet, like very high level test cases.
It doesn't have to be a new language. I'm sure some existing language can be used to create a DSL that serves this purpose.
It can obviously never be complete. Some parts of the spec will always have to be natural language if we want to make the best use of LLMs.
Maybe we can have Large Logic Models instead, and they could have formalized keywords with rigid meanings? Like IF, WHILE and FOREACH maybe. Or even ASYNC if you want to be modern about it.
I do think that AI models should get better at logic. But if code generators are supposed to be tools, we have to tell them what to do. I'm not sure what combination of languages is best for that purpose.
It would be so much easier if we could precisely specify what we wanted, without all the double meanings, slang and general ambiguity that comes from using a natural language.
If only there was an entire class of well-studied languages which don't have any such ambiguity. They'd be perfect for programming LLMs! We could call them "programming languages" perhaps.
But what we want is a lot of ambiguity on the implementation side and some targeted ambiguity on the specification side where appropriate.
The benefit is if you lean heavily on types then successful compilation is a massive indicator in the feedback loop. Using stop hooks to ensure successful compilation after every iteration is a game changer. Go also has compilation of course but because the type system is so much more robust in Rust the compilation guarantees so much more about the behaviour of your program. You end up just code reviewing the shape and flow of data.
Code compiling is really the lowest bar of code validation, and doesn't say much of anything of the code running correctly. AI will pump out the most convoluted, over engineered, and at the same time sloppy code if you let it - and it will all compile fine.
Yes, but all else being equal it is a higher bar in Rust than in Go. There are fewer things left for the human to check after a clean build+lint in Rust than in Go. The issue of over-engineered AI output is orthogonal to that.
Overengineering and convoluted code stand out when reading. The hard part are the subtle errors. And the Rust compiler helps you out a lot more here
It's the lowest bar and that's precisely why you want it to be as high as possible.
For me, one of the bigger complaints is that Rust isn't pedantic enough. Panic free Rust isn't taken seriously enough as an idea.
I wish it would catch even more things, since it works so well.
Go was never about being easy to write (thought it is), but it was always about being easy to read and it is, by far, the easiest language to read that I've ever used (and throughout the decades, I went through Basic, Pascal, C, Java, JavaScript, C#, TypeScript, Ruby and Python). That becomes even more important if you are not writing the code yourself...
it's too verbose, yet not explicit.
you need to know the conventions to spot what's not there (did you miss the error handling? or the magic comment for the whatever codegen serializer? c'est la vie!)
edit: just a few comments below an even better description of what I'm trying to convey: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48264853
Disagree, if you miss the error handling the code won’t compile (unless you return _, which should be easy to spot)
The magic comment stuff is very much “do it once” and it’s done (for example if using go generate).
> The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers.
In practice, anything that makes it easier for humans to program also makes it easier for LLMs to program.
You also wont typically learn that the LLM is close to the limits of understanding your code base until after it has blown past it's own capabilities, leaving you with a mountain of code that you are not skilled enough to fix.
Java, C# are good choices as they tend to enforce a certain structure. Go, good because it's very readable even if you dont know the language.
C++, Rust are poor choices unless you are already a senior in that language.
Go is really easy to read and write, even if Go's philosophy means that some of that feels clunky because it's less featureful than other languages. It makes up for it with a comprehensive stlib that makes it trivial to build services with few to no third party dependencies.
I don't think the value prop has changed at all there. One day the AI gravy train will stop and people who used AI to punch above their weight will no longer be able to debug the stuff they built unless they put in the hard work of learning the language.
Nothing to worry about with Go in that respect because of how much it's been designed to be simple. Even the annoying err/nil checks you need to do all the time are in service of that simplicity. It gets old fast but it leaves nothing to the imagination.
The value prop of Go in not on writing, but in reading and comprehension by people different from the autor(s). For systems expected to last some years, this translates in reduced total cost of maintenance over the life of the system (in my experience typically 80% or more of the total cost) and facilitating traspassing maintenance to diferent people than the authors. In use cases where Go has "good enough" performance, for backend systems with business logic and small amount of "bare metal" programming, I recommend Go to teams instead of Rust. When extreme performance and reduced memory footprint is more important than the other properties, Rust is better than Go.
>Now that we have agentic coding I just write everything in Rust and couldn’t be happier. The struggle with rust was writing it, go was made so it was easy to write for mid level engineers. Now that we have agentic coding I’m not sure Go’s value prop holds up anymore
Agents seem to have a better time with Go. Humans need to review the agents outputs and in general they have an easier time to do it with Go.
> Rust lacks a uniform error type
Rust has practically one error, it's the Error trait. The things you've listed are some common ways to use it, but you're entirely fine with just Box<dyn Error> (which is basically what anyhow::Error is) and similar.
Having many semantic options for error usage is functionally the same as having many error types, except worse.
Please go write C++ and then come back to us
I spent 5 years writing C++.
They all convert seamlessly, and the enums make the branches explicit. Don't even need to check the documentation to find which errors supposedly exists like in Go with its errors.Is, errors.As, wrapping and what not.
An easy rule before you make a knowledge based choice is Thiserror for libraries, helping you create the standard library error types and Anyhow for applications, easy strings you bubble up.
Or just go with anyhow until you find a need for something else.
https://crates.io/crates/anyhow
https://crates.io/crates/thiserror
I’ve repeatedly tried using Rust and the error handling has tripped me up every time and has been ~90% of the reason for moving a project back to another language. I’m sure I’m just holding it wrong, but what I run into usually goes something like this (mind you, I have read the Rust book):
* Someone tells me to use enums for errors, in a comment like yours
* I try writing the enums by hand, implementing the error trait
* I realize that in order to use the ? operator I need to implement From on my errors (I’ve read so many comments about how awfully verbose Go errors are, so I assume I’m supposed to use ? in Rust). There are also some other traits IIRC but I’ve forgotten them.
* I realize that this is pretty tedious, manual work, so someone points me to thiserr or similar
* Now I’m debugging macro expansion errors and spending approximately the same amount of time
* I ask around and someone tells me not to bother with thiserr and to just write the boilerplate myself or else to use anyhow or boxed errors everywhere
* I try using boxed errors everywhere, which works, but now I have all of these allocations which feels like I’m doing something that will bite me later. Oh well, but now I need to annotate my errors so I can figure out what is actually happening. I guess I should use anyhow for this?
* Anyhow mostly works but this is approximately as verbose as the Go error handling that I’m told is Very Bad, and when I ask for code review most Rust people are telling me not to use anyhow because errors should be enums, at least in the API surface
I’m sure I’m doing it wrong, but as with many things in Rust, the Right Way is so rarely clear and every other Rust person gives different advice about how to solve my problem and the only thing they seem to agree on is that Rust has an easy solution and that I’m following the wrong advice. (Similarly when I had lifetime problems and half the community told me to just use clone and Rc everywhere until I had performance problems, so instead I just had different static analysis problems).
I don’t love Go’s error handling. It feels like there has to be something better than its runtime-typing. But it largely gets out of the way—creating an error is just implementing the Error method, and if you need a concrete type you use Is/As/AsType. Wrapping is fmt.Errorf. All of this is built into the stdlib and used pretty ubiquitously across the ecosystem—I don’t run into “this dependency uses a different error framework”. Error handling is marginally more verbose than with Rust if you are actually attaching context in both, and neither solves the problem of which call frame attaches the context about specific function parameters (e.g., which level of error context specifies that the function was called with path “/foo/bar.baz”). It’s terrible, but it works—feels like the least bad thing until the Rust community can arrive at some consensus and document it in The Book. Or maybe I just need to try again in the LLM era?
> “this dependency uses a different error framework”.
Common in HTTP land. The HTTP system returns a different error type than the network I/O system, but they can be sorted out.[1]
[1] https://github.com/John-Nagle/maptools/blob/main/rust/src/co...
there are many (right) ways for writing monad transformers, and it's usually situation dependent which one makes sense. (practical aspects such as which errors do you want to merge, ignore, provide some default/fallback result; and of course overall coding style consistency helps guide this, but it's not trivial.)
(there's a lot of this in Scala too, because of the various monads/containers, eg. the built-in Future, and then Scalaz.IO, FS2, Cats, ZIO, etc...)
regarding lifetime and performance problems, the best practice seems to design the rough scaffolding of the program first, with the structs, so the who owns whom can be figured out. but this is far from trivial. Rust is very good at forcing developers to stare at these problems, but solving them requires practice and patience.
for me the tech toolbox that makes sense is TS by default (because of the super convenient type system and tooling), and Rust when the circumstances really justify it (latency, throughput, scalability, cost effectiveness, or a need for a single native executable [though nowadays this is also pretty simple with Deno], or more safety/control [no GC])
How come you get macro expansion errors? Or is it because you write incorrect syntax in the enum error definitions?
The example on the docs page is quite clear:
https://docs.rs/thiserror/latest/thiserror/#example
Including all kinds of errors: Strings, tagged unions and automatically converting from std::io::Error with added context.
That one page document is the entire documentation for the thiserror crate.
It’s been a while, I don’t remember the details, but it wasn’t syntax errors.
I'm so perplexed by this, because Rust errors are what make the language so amazing.
> Now I’m debugging macro expansion errors and spending approximately the same amount of time
This never happens once you've learned the language a bit more. Anyhow and thiserror are a cinch.
> I realize that this is pretty tedious, manual work, so someone points me to thiserr or similar
Claude writes Rust so effectively. It can do all of this for you now. It's effortless. In fact, I don't see any reason to use any other language unless I'm targeting web or some specific platform, or dealing with legacy code. Rust is now the best tool for most problems.
> Similarly when I had lifetime problems and half the community told me to just use clone and Rc everywhere until I had performance problems, so instead I just had different static analysis problems
Do this for a month, then it'll click and be second nature. Also Claude will make quick work of it now.
> feels like the least bad thing until the Rust community can arrive at some consensus and document it in The Book
It's difficult because it's so different. But once you get used to it, you'll realize it's the best approach we have right now.
> Or maybe I just need to try again in the LLM era?
Seriously this. You'll be writing Rust code as quickly as you would Python code. It'll be high quality. And the type system will mean that Claude emits better code on average. You'll pick it up quickly.
I think Claude may be what makes me use Rust successfully. Firstly it’s ability to deal with the tedium and secondly not needing to solicit help from people who tell me my problem is trivial while giving contradictory solutions :)
> And the type system will mean that Claude emits better code on average.
I’m curious if this is true. I believe that it emits better code than with a dynamically typed language, but as with people I don’t know that the sweet spot is at the extreme. Or maybe it is at the extreme when the context is small but as the context grows perhaps code quality suffers as it has more constraints to balance?
Surely you need an alternative to Box<dyn Error> for reporting memory allocation failures?!
Anything other than panic/abort on allocation failure is outside the scope of the vast majority of programs, including anything using the standard library in Rust. I wouldn't worry about Box<dyn Error>.
A &(dyn Error + 'static) should be fine for that; you don't need any allocated/variable sized data in a memory allocation failure.
stacktraces? might also be useful to know whether or not the latest allocand was a jumbo sized allocand that caused the failure?
Do you really want that data passed back down to the caller of the allocation? From the description of the failure state you'd want to log that data instead: what's the caller of the allocation going to do if you tell it it failed with a crazy size? It already knows the size, it's the one who asked for it.
So, suppose it's a rust library -- you're locking me into whatever logging system the library author chooses? Maybe I'd like to consume the relevant data at the entry point and send it to a logging system of my choice.
A Rust library likely wouldn't be returning an opaque Box<dyn Error> to begin with. Errors are part of a library's API—it's what allows consumers to handle them—so you'd define an enum of possible errors your library could produce and return that, which would be stored on the stack.
What about the data in the error payload?
I think this is a clash of terminology: a Rust enum isn't an integer with pretensions of an identity.
You'd describe it as a tagged union in some languages. So when you say you'd return an error with extra information, what that information is is associated with the specific variant of the enum.
Using yuriks AllocError as an example, if the error is SizeTooLarge, it has the size field. Other errors may have no additional data, others may have different data.
When you return an error from your allocating function, it's a known size, the size of the largest enum variant + the discriminant (tag).
That's part of the error enum.
This enum has a known size and doesn't require any dynamic allocations.You can do better than the errors in other languages. You can provide all the relevant information in the emum variant.
The beauty with Rust is that you can create really detailed concrete errors at the crate level. Your callers will know exactly what the actual error states are.Your application can be a little less structured if you want. Though with LLMs, I'm using anyhow and thiserror a lot less.
In the current context with regards to failed allocations, you're also supposed to add a variant that wraps AllocError.
it depends, if the functionality represented by the library is known to require a lot of memory (or simply allocation failures are an expected part of its operation), then it should be pretty much part of the API, probably with some tracing/diagnostics interface to get the required visibility into how much memory goes and where.
but for most libraries I on allocation failure I don't expect any fancy logging system. maybe even panic is fine.
usually “stdout” is good enough, wrapper/runner routes output to logserver for collation and search. who cares about formats as long as it’s reasonably structured and searchable?
And how do you store a stacktrace without allocating?
Any time I mention "but I would like stacktraces with my errors" I get told I'm doing it wrong.
That's because the types of errors where you want a stack trace are a relatively small subset of all possible errors.
Stack traces are only useful for errors that indicate a bug in the program, i.e. something a programmers has to respond to. It's not useful for the vast class of bugs that are a result of wrong input, wrong external state, or infrastructure issues.
Rust projects tend to favor panicking over error handling for programmer bugs (which does indeed give you a stack trace depending on environment variables), or even better encoding the invariants in the type system, but there are cases where an error coming from a library are truly, actually unexpected, so both `anyhow` and `thiserror` do provide support for attaching a stack trace in those situations.
See? You get people explaining to you that you actually don't want a stack trace because xyz.
If you let the allocation error panic you will get your stack trace.
You can't have a stack trace on an error in the error path that failed to allocate. If you have a "jumbo sized" error and the error fails to allocate, it won't get reported. The only reporting you will get is that the error failed to allocate and this new allocation error overrides the error that failed to allocate.
You're already writing Rust in a very different style if you're writing the type of code that gracefully handles allocation failure. It's to Rust's immense credit that this type of coding is actually fairly well-supported (unlike in Go), but you're already a bit off the beaten path for stuff like error handling.
Not sure what your problem is?
If you need to handle an allocation error in the error path, then the error reporting path must abort, which means that the allocation error must be bubbled up.
There is no real solution to an allocation error inside the error path. Even if you preallocate an arena for errors, the error might be large enough that it won't fit inside the arena.
Hence the best thing you can do from that point onwards is to have an error enum with an AllocError variant that doesn't allocate. Said error won't contain any information beyond line numbers of the allocation error since you just don't have the space for it.
In the end you will basically end up with panic free code, but the error still bubbles up like regular unwinding.
So yeah you can do it, and I will do it in the future, but I personally think that the people who think this is some huge deal breaker don't understand the problem in the first place.
For me the main advantage of Go over Rust is compilation speed. Then compared with Go Rust still rely on many C and C++ libraries making it problematic to cross-compile or generate reproducible builds or static binaries.
The minus side of Go is too simplistic GC. When latency spikes hit, there are little options to address them besides painful rewrite.
Go has the Green Tea GC since 1.25. It’s no longer simplistic and quite well engineered. The AVX-512 support was especially interesting to me.
https://go.dev/blog/greenteagc
I've run into GC pauses, I think in many (most?) cases there is some class of bulky data that you can either move into slices of pointer-free structs (so the GC doesn't scan them) or off-heap entirely. The workload where GC is slow is also likely prone to fragmentation so whatever the language you'll have to deal with it.
Java with its copying GC deals fine with fragmentation albeit at the cost of more upfront memory. And even in Rust one can change the allocator to try to deal with fragmentation. But with Go there is simply no good options besides the rewrite.
Possibly in your specific application, usually there are a handful of options far less painful than a rewrite.
For the original issue of GC pauses, a narrow change is to move problem data to non-pointer-carrying types, or the bigger hammer of manually managed slices of those types. The second helps with fragmentation too. Some workloads can be split into multiple processes as a direct way to have smaller heaps. If none of those options are enough then off-heap storage lets you do whatever you want.
I do have some complaints about Go, but one of the big ones has been fixed since I last wrote much Go code and it seems like a fine choice for a lot of applications.
> For me the main advantage of Go over Rust is compilation speed.
Interestingly, Rust has quite good failed compilation speed. That's almost good enough. The usual Rust experience is that it's hard to get things to compile, and then they work the first time.
I've never been bothered by long compilation times, it gives me time to think about what the code should actually do.
To other people's usage patterns though, I imagine the group of people who don't do much with the type system rely more on running a built binary to see if it worked, which means they'll pay the full compile/link time cost more often.
Rust compilation speed is a matter of tooling, they could have something like OCaml or Haskell interpreters, which so far hasn't been a priority.
Or having Cranelift as default backend.
What kind of apps are you writing where GC spikes matter?
trading, networking, gaming, ai, realtime, almost anything with hard response requirements.
if you are hitting pauses due to GC issues, you should into putting appropriate data structures into a memory arena, here's a reasonable read:
https://uptrace.dev/blog/golang-memory-arena
These are all tools. Java used to have this all the time, and we (ex-java programmer) had ways around this until the JVM improved.
Isn’t it somewhat easy to remove allocations in Go? I haven’t had to “rewrite” as such, but rather lifting some allocation out of loop. Am I misunderstanding the scenario?
Pauses are a problem with heap size and structure, not allocation rate, because the pause is caused by GC code that is O(heap size). Making garbage slower reduces the frequency but not severity. This is an issue with most GCs to some degree, there are phases of collection where the GC stops execution and the duration is relative to how much work it has to do which is based on how many objects and how much memory needs to be checked. "Concurrent" garbage collection is the approach of trying to reduce the pauses by doing more of the work while program execution continues. It's complicated and hard to get right, so Go's original GC was IIRC fully stop-the-world.
There are some fine points to the O(heap size), for example it's clearly unnecessary for the GC to scan objects that do not themselves contain pointers, and work is somewhat proportional to the total number of objects. Combining numerous small objects into manually managed slices, coming up with ways to make the most numerous items pointer-free, etc.
I learned a bit about this when an analytics workload I had ended up with unacceptable pauses (I think over 1 second), Go's GC is more sophisticated now but I think in any GC runtime you have the same considerations to some degree. Some of the best writing at the time was by Gil Tene, one of the principal authors of the C4 concurrent collector at Azul Systems, starting point here:
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-dev/c/GvA0DaCI2BU/m/SmEel...
With backend serving many clients with widely varying performance profile of individual requests when latency spikes happen there is no particular hot loop. Just many go routines each doing reasonable thing but with a particular request pattern hitting pathological case of GC.
Extreme variance in usage patterns will always be challenging. But pre allocating some reasonably sized buffers can go a long way.
Removing enough allocations to avoid fragmentation can be maddenly difficult/tedious.
> Rust still rely on many C and C++ libraries
Yes but Rust has a lot more availability of libraries to do stuff as a result. Want to do anything ML or scientific? You at least have a route in Rust where you don’t with Go.
With Go basic stuff like url parsing or HTTPS support is written in Go and comes with the standard library. With Rust too many necessary things are just wrappers around C and C++ making cross-compilation and reproducible builds much harder to archive.
As for availability if CGO is ok, then calling C or C++ code from Go is not that hard. Also, there is always an option to just start C++ process if extra data copies are OK.
C APIs are much more annoying to wrap in Go than in Rust because of lack of enums (important) and unions (less important).
Nonsense, Rust has plenty of native libraries for HTTP and JSON.
Has there been a lot of progress with ML in Rust? I don't really keep up with it because it seems like every crate ends up getting abandoned and I just gave up caring.
I agree! The line early on about this being for backend services caught my attention. I love the Rust language and use it for embedded firmware and PC applications, but still use Python for web backends, because Rust doesn't have any tool sets on the tier of Django (Or Rails). It has Flask analogs, without the robust Flask ecosystem. I have less experience with Go, but would choose it over Rust for web backends, for the same reason you highlight: The library (including framework) ecosystem. I am also not the biggest Async Rust fan for the standard reasons (The rust web ecosystem is almost fully Async-required).
Conversely, the Go community tends to actively shun frameworks, especially anything Rails-like, and will tell you to just use the standard library. Which is good advice, the standard library really does have everything you need. But it's also roughly on a par with what's available in Rust (though as someone said above, the Go stdlib routines have been heavily, massively, tested in production by now, and are fully mature and load-bearing).
Interesting! Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project? Or each person and org has their own toolkit they use?
Yes.
I think few people would want to use an ORM for the stuff you use Go for, but there are things like SQLC which can generate a lot of your "dynamic DB magic" without actually being a real dependency. You can set SQLC up to run in a container in a completely isolated environment, and then use the output, but you can frankly also just maintain the SQL which frankly isn't that different than using an ORM once you've set up the automation with ridicilously strict policies.
We use Go for some of our more vital backend parts. We mainly use Python for entirely different reasons, but since we're an energy company it's nice to have a standard library that can do everything without any sort of external dependencies. It's not because we have some sort of "not invented here" fetish, it's because we have to write and maintain a literal fuckton of complaince documents for every external dependency we use and it's already a full time job for just for Python in our information security department.
We tend not to use ORMs, because they're evil.
There are various libraries people use for auth, etc. But rolling your own isn't hard - Go has (e.g.) bcrypt in the standard library, so most of the heavy lifting is already done, you can write a solid auth implementation in <50 lines of code using that.
Generally Go prefers libraries to frameworks. Wrap the hard bits up into a library that can then be used widely in any implementation, rather than rolling it into a one-size-fits-all implementation that doesn't really suit anyone properly.
I second that no-ORM statement. I even follow that in Java. Object mapping is fine, but I’ll write my own SQL, rather than debug obscure (to me) HQL queries.
please don’t generalize. there is no “we” ..
“we” are all different and i can tell you from experience that there are also many people and teams who use go and prefer ORMs and frameworks and do not build everything from scratch …
true, but there does tend to be a consensus (or has been) in the Go community around a lot of this stuff.
> We tend not to use ORMs, because they're evil.
This is typical Go culture. If it is not readily available in the language or the standard library, it's evil. It's an easy cop out to explain away the gaps in the ecosystem.
Not long ago, the Go team was saying that generics are evil for that very same reason.
Rust backend is like this too, albeit softer. The gaps are explained as "Why would I want that/I don't need that" instead of "evil".
My GitHub is dominated by rust projects, and I think it's the nicest overall language. But not nice enough to write bespoke solutions for problems that have had robust solutions since before I started programming! There is a basic set of functionality most web apps use, and that hasn't changed in a decade+; I don't want to re-write my own version of this, nor fight compatibility problems from (comparatively) poorly-integrated and documented libs.
I am trying to make good decisions, and am weighing "This long-standing solution does everything I need, and is easy to use and well-documented etc" vs "People on the internet are telling me I don't need it, or I can use X rust lib instead". It feels like the "We have McDonald's at home" meme.
Most projects I see use the standard library for almost everything, but everyone leverage a few libraries here and there for one thing or the other.
It's just a different philosophy, but it's really not unlike Rails users importing Devise or Sideqik or RSpec.
>Are Go backend building custom auth, admin, DB ORM/migrations/auto migrations, templates, email, dev server etc for each project?
lmao, basically, yes. except when you bring this up ppl think it's not a big deal / a means for self-expression. having to sort through which libraries you prefer to glue together is a kind of freedom, if you squint hard enough.
I tend to use whatever I perceive to be the most fitting library for each of those concerns (except ORM), but not complete frameworks.
For backend web dev, there are advantages. I really like Axum's use of typing:
With a route like: …the "dataset_id" path variable is parsed straight into the dataset_id arg, and a query string "verbose" is parsed into a boolean. Super convenient compared to Go, and you type validation along with it.Many other things to like: The absence of context.Context, the fact that handlers can just return the response data, etc.
What I don't like: Async.
go is slightly more verbose (surprise) but you can achieve the same thing using struct binding in gin:
This is actually a great example - what happens in that Rust version when the input parsing fails? Go makes it explicit.I'm not sure if that's a great example. What kind of errors could ShouldBindQuery return?
I would assume Axum returns a bad request error for you when query parsing fails, but if you do want more control over how the error is handled, you can change the parameter type to Result<Query<bool>, QueryRejection>, and the type system itself documents precisely what errors you can match against.[0]
[0]: https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/extract/rejection/enum.Quer...
A project I work at uses a similar pattern (similar from what I can see):
It's just a wrapper.It also serializes/deserializes responses and handles both JSON and templates.
db is just a singleton-lifetime dependency, we often also have ctx, http.Request, http.Response, Cookie, which are request-time lifetimes.
I thought about open-sourcing it but most Golang developers seem to hate it with a passion, so I just gave up, haha.
The Go standard library has learned to interpret path variables as well:
https://go.dev/blog/routing-enhancements
To be fair, it's not -quite- as useful - `req.PathValue` only returns `string` and you have to do the conversion to other types yourself which could lead to a faffy mess of code.
You can not use async right? Maybe not with axum but I imagine there are fully blocking frameworks for rust.
Rust does not have three error systems. It has one: the Error trait. io::Error is one of many that implement it (nothing special about it). Errors defined via thiserror also implement it.
“Anyhow” just allows you to conveniently say “some Error” if you don’t care to write out an API contract specifying types of errors your function might spit out.
He's not making that up; in practice, you're going to run into and need to make mental space for the idiosyncrasies of multiple error frameworks.
Not sure what you mean by that. If you're consuming the API of a crate that has functions that return errors, you're not really dealing with a "framework", you're just dealing with whatever the `E` is in the `Result<T, E>`. If that `E` doesn't implement std::error::Error, I'd consider that a deficiency (even a bug) for that crate. (Yes, I know some crates want to support use in `no_std` environments; that's what features are for.)
If I care about the specific variants of error that a function can return, so I can do different things depending on what kind of error occurred, I'll read the docs and match. That's not really a "framework" thing; that's just a basic thing that anyone has to do in any language in order to consume an API. If I need to propagate the error, I'll do so (either directly, or by wrapping it in a variant of my own error type). I don't see how any of this is "framework"-y.
A crate's decision to use thiserror (or not) does not matter to me. If a crate exposes `anyhow::Error`, that's a lazy choice and bad API design, but still "works" and I generally don't need to care about it.
Or is there something else you meant when you said "error frameworks"?
Just wanted to add that `Error` has been in core since `1.81` [1], meaning that even `no_std` environments can/should represent errors the same way.
[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/error/trait.Error.html
I guess you might have to if you need to use a library someone's written that doesn't implement the standard.
Writing primarily applications, I couldn't tell you what error handling frameworks my dependencies are using: I literally don't know, and haven't needed to know in order to display, fail, or succeed.
EDIT to add: I use anyhow for this, so I should also add "add context to an error when I fall" to the list of things I do.
What's the standard? I'm not being snarky; I'm going down the thought process of how this would work in practice.
I am on team Io Error [on std rust]", somewhat arbitrarily. If I call a lib that is on Team Anyhow, or Team Custom Error Enum, I will have to do some (Straightfoward, but a little clumsy) conversions if I want ? to work. This is complicated by being able to impl From<ErrorType1> for ErrorType2 only in one direction if you don't control the other crate. (due to the orphan rule)
By standard I meant an error type that implements std::error::Error.
EDIT: Which I assume all my dependencies have done, given that anyhow is able to consume all of them.
I specifically called out writing applications as my use case: my only objection to tptacek's note is the somewhat universal "in practice". The burden for designing errors for a library that others will use is higher, but that's far from the default/universal experience.
Many more people are going to consume libraries & not produce any of their own, and I think my experience is representative there.
There is no team io::Error. There is only one standard: https://doc.rust-lang.org/core/error/trait.Error.html
Not rust specific, and most certainly not a criticism of you - but I hate when people call a lib that errors, then just bubble that error up.
I mean the error is supposed to be tailored to the audience - I guess what you are saying is that you handle the error by saying "I called foo with X, Y, Z, and got this error back" in the logs - which your caller then also does - producing a log message of
ERROR: I called Foo with X Y and Z and got error: Die MF die
followed by
ERROR: I called Bar with X Y Z and a and got error: ERROR: I called Foo with X Y and Z and got error: Die MF die mf (still fool)
And so on and so forth.
If the counter is - don't log, that's fine, but you have to know where in the call graph that error state was reported to the logs
I have tried to figure out some kind of unification between "collecting error state in a function", "logging error state", and "return error state to a parent".
I haven't found any satisfying solution to it all; collecting information for logging vs information that a caller would want... I've been meaning to investigate tracing_error to see if it brings it all together.
Regardless of language - if you find a good, clear answer - blog the hang out of it - I for one have been searching for the right way to manage this, and it's not (yet) clearer - other than what I've said so far
You’re supposed to bubble errors up to the level that can appropriately deal with them? You don’t need to log them each step of the way.
Yeah - but that's the same as my final point - you have to know who is supposed to manage the error/log - all the way up (and down) the call graph
edit: I've just finished debugging a multi system chain - FE -> SNS -> SQS -> Lambda -> DynamoDB -> Lambda -> Webhook -> My poor code
My code has multiple layers - and I was trying to find where in the very long chain of calls the data was being mangled
It turned out that there was an unlogged error, which was mismanaged by a caller - there's no shade here - the caller was handling the error how it was designed to, but by not logging that there was an error - it took a minute to understand.
I was a big fan of go for a while. Though now that I have programmed more swift and rust recently, having a compiler that doesn’t protect against null pointer deferences or provide concurrency safety guarantees feels a little prehistoric.
Though go certainly did a much better job than rust on the standard library front.
Standard library is something you have to maintain for all eternity, with identical API. It had been argued that some concurrency primitives like channels would have been better outside of std (for rust, to be clear). Once dependency management is solved, a small std is beneficial.
> you have to maintain for all eternity, with identical API
People always tout this as a huge reason for not wanting a too big std in Rust (or "too useful" either), but IMHO that's just talking about reaching theoretical optimals, while leaving the community for years without good guidance via providing a opinionated practical and pragmatic way of doing things. Which I find to be a very unhelpful stance for a tool such as a programming language.
If a design of some std package didn't pass the test of time, and a new iteration would be beneficial, the language can leave its original API version right there, and evolve with a v2, with an improved and better thought out API after learning from the mistakes of v1.
Prime example: "hey we found that math/rand had some flaws, so here is math/rand/v2". A practical solution, and zero dramas as a result of having rand be part of std.
Perhaps it would help if stdlibs were be versioned, with the chosen version declared in the project file. For existing languages, a lack of version would simply indicate the original stdlib, meaning nothing should break.
I definitely don't think stdlibs should be changed often, but it seems fairly damaging to a language when things may be added to a stdlib but never removed, no matter how broken or misconceived (see C++).
Rust is a great language, but the poor stdlib + overreliance on crates + explosion of unvetted transient dependencies makes it a hard sell for a lot of projects.
I use go because of the large and useful stdlib. I rarely have to reach for an external library, and even then I only consider libraries that are very popular. If a library isn’t available, I’ll just write my own, using the stdlib. I recently used the awesome crypto library to implement an envelope encryption system, I didn’t need anything outside of the stdlib or Google’s x library (x is effectively the experimental stdlib).
Having too much external code, like npm or rust crates, seems like a nightmare for me.
Doesn't Rust already have that solved via editions? If anything, that's the language that's especially well positioned here.
I believe the stdlib can't be versioned like that: there's only one stdlib linked into a final artifact, you can't have two versions with differing APIs in there.
There's work on edition aware name resolution so that a type with the "nice path" can change over an edition while still accessible through a longer path, but 1) it's not implemented yet, 2) it hasn't been used yet (see 1), 3) if it is ever used it should be done very sparingly (because of the bafflement that can occur if someone follows older docs in the new edition, implementation will come with efforts to mitigate these problems).
For me going from JVM and CLR ecosystem of programming languages into Go for backend development is a downgrade.
The language design makes sense in the context of Oberon (1987), and Limbo (1995).
Now when there are so many options finally building on top of Standard ML, and Lisp heritage, having to settle with Go feels like a downgrade.
I code since 1986, if I wanted if boilerplate error handling, or having cost as the only mechanism to declare constant values, there have been plenty of options.
I don't fully get the argument about errors.
in rust say a function returns Result<T, E> so either the we get a result all an error how is that different from (int, err) in go?
do you not still need to handle the error?
in go you just return the error up to whatever the top caller is.
Go funcs can return both a value and an error, or neither, it's a common gotcha. Having to check the behavior each time is no fun.
Missing error handling is checked at compile-time in Rust (lint-time in Go), and can be enabled for any struct or function (https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/attributes/diagnostics.h...), not just `Result<T,E>`.
Returning an error to the caller in Rust can be done with a single character.
In Go you can ignore the error value though, and use directly the returned value (`int` in your example). In Rust you cannot do that, you need to unwrap the Result or use the `?`
If the returned value is still valid despite an error, then the function would return (u32, Option<Error>), perfectly valid rust. If the value is meaningless in case of an error then using it is incorrect code; you wouldn't want to do that in either language and rust makes that assumption explicit with unwrap. If you want a default value in case of error just use unwrap_or_default.
I use Rust for web services all the time. It's a dream compared to Go (which I wrote professionally for years).
At this point, I can't imagine a scenario not to use Rust for writing a web API.
What is "formal QA support"?
> Rust lacks a uniform error type.
Not quite true. The unifying error trait is std::error::Error.
> pain when you have to pass them upward through a chain of calls
Kind of? You just make an enum with the various variants that need to be passed through and use the #[from] macro to generate the conversion code automatically.
It’s more characters than eg. A union type in Python or TypeScript, but it’s not much more.
Plus, it makes you think about your error design, which is important!
The funny thing is: All Rust source code looks like an assembly syntax error.
If you spend an hour skimming the Rust Book it's not really that bad
It's not that bad, but when compared to C or Go, it's not something that I would like to type by hand. At least Java has IDEs which reduce the amount of verbosity you need to type. I know you get safety, but the verbosity and cargo is is a con in my opinion.
I just hate how many dependencies you have to pull in for a typical Rust project vs Go. As far as Go being an ugly language, there are some interesting wrappers that put lipstick on that pig such as https://lisette.run/
But personally, I don’t mind Go at all. I’ve even begun to prefer it for some things. That may be Stockholm syndrome, though.
Been playing with Lisette for a few weeks, so far im really liking it. Think is has some potential.
Rust is easily one of the worst languages to look at
thiserror and anyhow are just std::error with extra steps. Note that io::error is just a specific std::error.
The entire point in Rust is that you wrap Error impls with other Error impls, or translate one impl into another using a match. I've found this is far more flexible and verifiable than most other languages, because if you craft your error types with enough rigor, you can basically have a complete semantic backtrace without the overhead of a real backtrace.
I use thiserror a lot to help with my impls. Notably, all it does is impl Display and Error. It's not a specific other paradigm because it basically compiles out, it's just a macro.
Anyhow is perhaps the closest one to another paradigm because it allows you to discard typed information in favor of just the string messages, but it still integrates well with Errors (and is one).
thiserror and anyhow are std::error::Error with fewer steps.
They're external crates that either generate Error implementations (thiserror) or act as dynamic wrappers implementing Error (anyhow), so they're more than a simple hand-written implementation. But the developer experience of pulling thiserror or anyhow off the shelf can certainly be more convenient than the hand-written implementation, sure.
I find Elixir's memory and threading models much more compelling than Go's for web services. There are many great libraries for Elixir as well, but if you need something else, Elixir makes rolling your own libraries very easy. I'd recommend giving Elixir a try, if you haven't already.
Or gleam if you don’t fancy elixir.
Go also has one glaring disadvantage. GC. Assuming you're in the cloud.
It's easy to write code that trivially eats memory. Plus any resources spent on it, are resources not spent on other cloud provider things.
>I could see migrating from C or C++ or Python to Rust, for various reasons, but for web back-end work Go is a good match. I write almost entirely in Rust, but the last time I had to do something web server side in Rust, I now wish I'd used Go.
Now there is a cult of rewriting everything in Rust. System level software? Yes. Web? I prefer not to.
Praising go for how it handles errors, when it's even worse than C where the compiler at least warns you if you're ignoring return values of calls. That's a new one.
Linters are available to catch you before you compile - with Go
Generally speaking there has to be a mechanism for optional handling of return values, in Go you can ignore everything (ew), you can use placeholders `_`, or you can explicitly handle things - my preference.
If you say "Well in C you have to handle the returns - I am not across C enough to comment, but I will ask you - Does C actually force you, or does it allow you to say "ok I will put some variables in to catch the returns, but I will never actually use those variables" - because that's very much the same as Go with the placeholder approach
edit: I am told the following is possible in C
trySomething(); // Assumes that the author of trySomething has not annotated the function as a `nodiscard`
(void)trySomething(); // Casts the return(s) to void, telling the compiler to ignore the non-handling
int dummy = trySomething(); // assign to a variable that's never used again
I welcome correction
C, as a language, cannot bother less about you using or not using the return values, checking them, discarding them, or using them to index an array without any bounds checking. Various linters and compilers may have their opinions, expressed as warnings, but at the end of the day it's completely up to you as a developer.
Same as in go, a language designed several decades later.
Which is probably not really surprising, if we consider who were the original designers of Golang!
Yeah - I assumed so - which makes the GP post... bizarre
This is a weird document that is simultaneously trying to serve as a migration guide and an advocacy document for Rust.
Ultimately, if you have to ask, the Rust vs. Go consideration boils down almost completely to "do you want a managed runtime or not". A generation of Rust programmers has convinced itself that "managed runtime" is bad, that not having one is an important feature. But that's obviously false: there are more programming domains where you want a managed runtime than ones where you don't.
That's not an argument for defaulting to Go in all those cases! There are plenty of subjective reasons to prefer Rust. I miss `match` when I write Go (I do not miss tokio and async Rust, though). They're both perfectly legitimate choices in virtually any case where you don't have to distort the problem space to fit them in (ie: trying to write a Go LKM would be a weird move).
The Rust vs. Go slapfight is a weird and cringe backwater of our field. Huge portions of the industry are happily building entire systems in Python or Node, and smirking at the weirdos arguing over which statically typed compiled language to use. Python vs. (Rust|Go) is a real question. Rust vs. Go isn't.
Exactly. 95% of programmers are application programmers - they ship software used by regular users. I think it's insane to use a non-GC language for most of those cases. Manual memory management is mentally taxing and it's easy to make catastrophic mistakes. The marginal benefit from it is just not worth it unless you're making games or a trading system.
5% who write tools or other "infra" layer for the other 95% to work on top of maybe need that level of control over memory. It doesn't make any sense to me to sign up for that complexity unless you really really need it.
Or it could be insane to pay the cloud memory costs when you have tools that can write rust for you.
What "cloud memory costs"? Most Rust code is an informally-specified version of the old Python reference-counting GC. That's how you're supposed to write it, with clone() everywhere, and then dropping down to optimize. You can do the same thing with Go in the other direction by writing an allocator.
People believe a lot of weird things about these languages.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but non-GC language doesn't mean you have to do memory management manually? I mean, for example, in Rust (or modern C++), it's basically automatic. There is no mental tax or catastrophic mistakes as far as I know.
Ok.
https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/
I'm not saying Rust is worse than Go. It obviously isn't. But this argument that Rust's memory management isn't more cognitively demanding than Go's memory management --- that isn't true.
Certainly you pay a price for lifetimes but you buy compile time race condition detection via the borrow checker's aliasing-xor-mutability enforcement. So all that is happening is the complexity of concurrency is being made explicit and therefore easier to reason about. Many applications can be architected in a way that wouldn't ever trigger a race, so for people working on that it isn't something they would need to reason about and they can call it unneeded complexity. This is the simpler vs. simplistic distinction also made in the article. If you can be simplistic, garbage collection is less cognitively demanding, but if you are designing race free algorithms with shared memory then rust will be. I do believe more developers and applications live in the former.
The better example actually comes from the article: returning a struct and an iterator over that struct isn't possible in rust. Heck, initializing a struct to return an iterator might lead to issues. Most people will encounter this before needing a linked list and the lesson it teaches will help out with the linked list.
Rust doesn't promise that your safe Rust doesn't have race conditions only specifically that it doesn't have the one very weird kind of race condition from computers with no analogue to the real world, a Data Race.
An ordinary race condition would be e.g. you put the cat out of the front door, then you walk to the kitchen and close that door - well, the cat might race around the outside of the house and get in first. Our world has race conditions, Rust doesn't solve them, take appropriate care.
A data race is much stranger, it's caused by a difference between how humans think about programming ("Sequential consistency" ie time's arrow X causes Y, therefore Y happens after X) and how the machine works (a modern multi-core computer does not exhibit this consistency) maybe you and your house mate both pick up the cat and she tries to put it out the kitchen door, you try to put it out the front door, this seems to work fine mostly but then on Tuesday the cat explodes, everything is covered in cat fur, messy. Rust actually has a whole layer of extra stuff beyond the aliasing-XOR-mutability to prevent this mistake because humans struggle to reason properly about software which loses sequential consistency so it almost doesn't matter what it "means" if this is lost.
> In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from [...] knowingly and deliberately using words in a different sense than the one the audience will understand.
Of course I mean data race, most people in such a thread will implicitly understand that is the race meant. Nobody building a webshop with limited supplies wants to prevent "first come first served", it barely makes sense to think about preventing that kind of race
Data races have obvious real world analogues, they are just so obvious people naturally synchronize. You can look over someone's shoulder while they update a paper master copy and observe data tearing as they erase a field and start writing in another value while that is inconsistent with the rest of the form. It is easy to see that data is being modified and wait until the writer is complete instead of memorizing a partial update and walking away to make decisions on the basis of the incomplete information. A good mutex/rwlock is like having a private separate room to go into to make the update so that no overeager person can even observe the partial update (some languages have non callback style mutexes so there the mutex/lock is the analogue of the visual cue that someone is performing the update). I don't find this at all strange to consider. In a concurrent system it is just all too easy to forget that there are other threads (analogue of people) reading/modifying at the same time. So rust makes that manifest through the borrow checker and it becomes obvious.
Rust prevents more than just data races. Even in single threaded code, if you have a reference to a struct (without explicitly choosing interior mutability), you are guaranteed that its value has not changed since the last time you read it, despite other parts of the code having a reference to it. You don't need to make defensive copies. Some people may find this useful, but generally it won't be enough to convince someone to drop their current language in favor of rust. This transfers into multi-threaded code as well: only a single thread can make modifications to a struct through a reference xor as many threads as you want can read from the struct with references. You can easily write go/java/python programs that have these features and so don't feature data races, but they are difficult to reason about: how do you know that there is only a single reference featuring mutation or many threads only reading? The answer requires non-local knowledge which is difficult to reason about and this is enough for some people to consider rust where the answer is local (defined by the variable).
> But this argument that Rust's memory management isn't more cognitively demanding than Go's memory management --- that isn't true.
It's not far from true. The fights you get into with the borrow checker can be legendary, but lifetimes serve more as gentle reminders. If you get stuck, you can always just use Rc, which is pretty close to opt-in GC. But it's rare to have to resort to Rc, because ownership is just not that much of a problem. In fact, I very rarely use Box either. All heap memory allocation is done by containers, not manually by me. I guess the main friction point for lifetimes is Rust's closures and async, but if you avoid them life is pretty simple.
In return for wearing this almost not a problem, you almost don't have to think about releasing a whole pile of other things - like closing files, sockets, and locks. They are guaranteed to be released by the same mechanism.
On balance, I would not be surprised if the cognitive balance tips Rust's way once you allow for the fact that Rust's memory management also gives you robust resource management for free.
How is Aria's linked list document relevant on this topic? Go is the kind of language where they'd call their growable array type "List" because why not. C# did that in fact, when it gained generics they named their generic growable array List<T>
So the linked list is a thing Go doesn't have at all, in Go the equivalent document probably just reminds you of Go's rule "Don't be clever". Thanks Go, I'll keep it in mind.
Generally the argument is that non-GC languages require you to worry about memory management because of Use-after-free, but of course safe Rust just won't compile if you wrote a typical use-after-free so that's not really extra cognitive demand.
You seem to imply that it doesn’t have any cost. It does. You have to make decisions and, in the case of C++: sometimes you have to deal with a lot of really ugly code to make it “automatic”. And if you really have to count bytes and carefully manage stack sizes because you are writing code for a constrained device, you have to pay even more attention than you would in C.
GC’ed languages have memory related challenges too. But it simply isn’t true that these are on the same order of difficulty as the difficulties that do arise in C++.
Yeah, I shouldn't have mentioned C++, it was a bad example.
This post is specifically about backend development, where you're not shipping software to regular users.
This is just a matter of perspective. Backend IS being "shipped" to user via the API be it go or rust and inevitably the details and behavior do leak out to end user.
> and it's easy to make catastrophic mistakes
such as ... ?
The use of LLMs has caused Rust usage to explode.
If youre not writing the code yourself and vibing away which I think most people generally are despite the disdain around here then why would you not choose the "more performant language" (I know that isnt necessarily reality but it is a common perception).
Go's managed runtime is less valuable when the LLM is perfectly happy to slap a bunch of stuff together for you to and approximate it and doesn't complain at all when writing async rust despite some of the rough edges.
Correction: The use of LLMs has caused every major language usage to explode.
And as mentioned in other comments, Rust slow compilation can be detrimental to LLMs + fast iteration speed. And it's not just speed, Tauri takes 20GB of disk space to compile. It's bonkers. This is npm/js ecosystem all over again but slower.
Another reason to pick Go if you're leaning on LLMs is the standard library. Often you can do more work with fewer dependencies.
I'd rather leverage world class engineers paid by Google to maintain dependencies for me than try my luck with half a dozen of 0.x crates. Plus stdlib APIs can (and are) versioned just like third party dependencies.
Fully agree with this. We use Rust in an enterprise setting for building web app backends and the experience is painful. A lot of crates just seem like someones side project. Too many ways to do things leads to bike shedding in PRs. Compile times are atrocious and can take like 30 mins to build.
Honestly using Go would have got us to the same point much quicker, with code that is much easier to review.
I like vibe coding but I am sceptical that a vibe coded runtime in Rust would be as awesome as the Go runtime which is written with deep expertise of Unix software and threading and many low level details that are subtle and do depend on global properties of the code to work flawlessly. It makes sense you can crank out Rust with an LLM if you know what you are doing, but if you want a GC type thing or preemptive scheduling across an N by M threading model, then you are competing against some very good code.
> the Go runtime which is written with deep expertise of Unix software
Go has no mmap(), import a 3rd party dependency for that and you'll get a segfault the very second you do a mistake.
Python has an mmap module which will catch many memory errors and present them as exception rather than causing a CVE.
I don't agree with the parent comment, but mmap is exposed (low-level) in the standard library and there's a high-level wrapper in x/exp. You need to be careful with mmap no matter where you're using it.
What Go mmap CVE were you thinking of?
> What Go mmap CVE were you thinking of?
Every time you see "segmentation fault", that right there is a CVE.
No, obviously.
I see the vibe security experts found my comment :D
I agree that agents make Rust a lot more tenable for less "kernel-and-browser"-demanding tasks than it was 4 years ago, but I do not agree that they eliminate the "managed vs. unmanaged runtime" question, and to the extent they influence any of this decisionmaking at all, you have to accept the notion of not reading the code. If you're reading it, it matters that Rust makes you do bookkeeping that managed runtimes avoid.
By that reasoning, we should all be vibing away C code. It's the most performant and efficient language out there, there's a ton of code out there the LLMs were trained on, and the complex logic of memory management is abstracted away by the LLM so you don't need to think about it.
Most people are not doing that though. There's probably a good reason, and it applies to other languages too.
There is a good chance that your vibe coded C program segfaults immediately upon running and contains lots of subtle logic errors, all of which requires many iterations (finding issues at runtime) before you program runs as expected.
With Rust, you'll likely get many compilation errors, but if your syntax is correct, compilation errors will be few, and your code will almost certainly just work.
I wouldn't build anything in C that I didn't absolutely have to, but, no, there is not in fact a good chance that your vibe-coded C program segfaults immediately.
In order to use C you need to actually understand it, also toolchain is more complex etc. Which makes it a no go for 99%.
Rust is so safe that anyone can vibe it without any idea what is going on there. Which is basically what is happening here.
And why rust is more used than go for vibecoding? Mostly because of hype and performance gains which 99.9% of projects do not need.
> performance gains which 99.9% of projects do not need.
most software isn't "needed"
> The use of LLMs has caused Rust usage to explode.
Rust had a "vibey" community long before vibecoding. In particular, it's long been fairly non-serious about yolo importing a bunch of crates to solve things (since the standard lib is small) which is kinda the same problem as having all those things just vibecoded. Either way, most projects weren't reading all of that other code!
For the vast majority of software you want a managed runtime.
Some of the problems Rust “solves” are problems you shouldn’t be having in the first place because we mostly write software that doesn’t need direct control over memory. Borrow checking isn’t something you want to have to deal with - it is something you have to accept when you have chosen to manage memory. That choice has a high cost that cost never gets paid off in most projects that could work just as fine with managed memory.
I’m a Go programmer, but this article reminded me that I should have more experience with Rust. From my perspective Rust seems a bit less practical. The standard library lacks support for cryptography, for instance. The compiler is slow, which is a productivity killer. Overall concurrency seems like a bit of an afterthought. Again.
What makes me want to try Rust in production are things like option types. Those would be nice to have in any language. Any issues that can be caught by the compiler are a plus. Getting rid of nil would also be a plus, but to be quite frank, I don’t experience that many nil pointer errors.
The author does nod to the static analysis tools for Go. Yes, they are not part of the compiler (for good reason), but they do a pretty good job in practice. So you get more than the compiler can promise at a fraction of the cost (measured in build time). That’s a much bigger deal for actual developers than we generally give it credit for.
Then there’s the stuff that makes me less convinced in terms of arguments. For instance the fact that Go didn’t have generics early on and that the standard library doesn’t use them. Generics were not as important as people thought they were. In practical reality. The fact that the standard library doesn’t make wide use of them is not a weakness, it shows restraint. They didn’t go overboard and prematurely plaster generics all over the place as soon as the language supported it. This is the kind of restraint you want to see. Remember how horrible Java was after everyone started abusing generics? A brief generation of software that was significantly worse, and less maintainable resulted from this exuberance. For the ultimate example of what happens when you give people every feature they wish for: look at C++. It´s not a very good language because it is many languages. Just because there are standards and recommendations doesn’t mean that all code magically gets rewritten to a narrower definition of the language. It means that we accumulate intermediate forms. I expect people who are interested in languages to understand these dynamics.
Rust's stdlib is small, Go took more of Python's "batteries included" strategy.
So in that sense it seems like a category error to try to look for crypto stuff in the standard library. Of course this brings the well known problem of "okay, but then which one should I use?". Nowadays this is largely solved by a few web searches and LLM queries, and people are quite helpful at https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/ .
Go was shaped by the needs of Google, Rust is a wildly successful amazing experiment in programming language and compiler design that really got out of hand :) (A bit like JavaScript! Or even C#! Or Python. Same growing pains (async/await!), but arguably on different levels.)
Have you argued yourself to "it's a bad thing that the Go standard library has a cryptography library"?
Aren't you overlooking the main point of the article?, the reason they migrated:
> concurrency — eliminating data races essentially, which we had before. Really gnarly bugs
> this is the one teams report most enthusiastically. The classes of bugs that survive go test -race and reach production (data races, nil dereferences, missed error paths) just don’t compile in Rust. Oncall rotations are typically very boring after a Rust migration. ...
> I hadn’t had to chase down a crash, or some weird multi-threaded race condition, or some of these other things which actually consumed a huge amount of my time before.
(They say at InfluxDb)
That's not a Rust vs. Go slapfight? Instead, sounds like a good judgement to me
Us Node folks adapted typescript because we wanted static compiled types.
I wish TS had more of a runtime. The only thing I'm jealous of with regards to python is how seamlessly you can do JSON schema enforcement on HTTP endpoints. The Zod hoops are a constant source of irritation that only exists because the TS team is dogmatic.
express-zod-api works well for me https://github.com/RobinTail/express-zod-api I'd say about as well as anything Python
I think Typescript is a perfectly cromulent language. I don't know it well but would seriously consider it for any problem that had a shape that admitted a dynamic language. There's a lot to be said for using dynamic languages, too!
Every non-runtime language is dynamic after being compiled to x64 machine code!
It is illusions and lies all the way down the instant the compiler finishes its job.
Check out Perry the TypeScript compiler to native code
It sounds like you should try ocaml
Indeed, if I were proposing contributions to the Linux kernel, or any other kind of systems development, I'd probably be considering Rust. For backend services, the decision is between C# and Go (with the latter being the favourite).
I think I'd be ok with node via purescript? But in general I think rust and go people should join forces against the evils of dynamic typing. Isn't type hinting finally considered best practice now? I think that is effectively an admission that it was a defect. And even with good ginting it is still worse than inference. Inference can let plenty of code go untouched on type changes, while still protecting against unindended type changes.
> Ultimately, if you have to ask, the Rust vs. Go consideration boils down almost completely to "do you want a managed runtime or not".
You don't need a garbage collector which is perhaps half of the Go Runtime when you're using Rust.
You can also bolt on a few crates and get ~95% of what you'd get from Go's runtime.
Go has the best runtime in the world. I'll give it that.
But this is not the only reason...
You obviously don't need a GC when you're using Rust, because Rust doesn't plausibly have one.
Right, so you don't need a large portion of Go's runtime benefits, because you have a far better version of it already, zero cost abstractions and TRUE memory safety, not pretend memory safety behind a -race detector with zero compiler guarantees...
I don't know who you're speaking to, but it isn't me; I certainly didn't ask for the standard-issue Rust langwar pitch.
> the Rust vs. Go consideration boils down almost completely to "do you want a managed runtime or not".
That's not really something I care much about. My beefs with Go are 90% about the syntax of the language itself, and it's weak (compared to Rust) type system.
When it comes to a managed runtime, for most tasks, I generally don't care if my language has one or not. For some tasks I do, but there are not many of those tasks, and so this question is mostly irrelevant to me when deciding Go vs. Rust.
I don't really get where you're seeing that the predominant Go vs. Rust debate is about the runtime. IME it's the subjective stuff about the languages themselves, and their ecosystems and communities.
> The Rust vs. Go slapfight is a weird and cringe backwater of our field.
::shrug:: I dunno, I mostly stay out of it and just use Rust, and I'm happy and avoid the drama. I've written a little Go here and there, didn't really like it, and moved on.
That's totally fine. I don't get why people moralize this stuff. Both of these languages are rounding errors compared to the dynamic languages.
I think people do this for every language. It becomes a part of their identity, and then they have to defend it. I used to do that too, long ago, but I don't have the time or energy for it for the most part, and find it boring, so that $LANG-user-as-identity bit of my has fallen by the wayside.
I don't think it's about adoption levels; sure Go and Rust are tiny compared to JS/python/etc. It's emotional, not about who has the most users or who can even plausibly get there.
Because it triggers the "feeling of other" when someone is so close yet so far ideologically.
I'm sure you know this joke about dogmas :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26624442
In some sense this is the same as the NIMBY/YIMBY question. There are perfectly valid reasons to want to live like Spacers do on Aurora, yet many prefer the caves.
It feels like you’re upset because your favorite language has objective flaws that people are pointing out. You’re also trying to minimize people’s lived experiences and pleading with them to stop pointing the flaws out.
Sure, Go is better than Python in some things. But developers deserve the best. We deserve not to have to deal with Go’s quirks, idiosyncrasies and design mistakes.
Well there's also the:
- Rust vs Swift slapfight
- Rust vs CPP fight (which is bit like Jake Paul vs. Anthony Joshua).
Strangely it's always Rust v something. It's almost as if they're hell-bent on Rust maximalism.
This is probably going to sound generic / repetitive, but my biggest complaint about Rust is the package management situation, which is entirely the result of the developer mindset. I love the ergonomics on the rust side (the functional approach to data types is beautiful), but I’m working on two projects side by side, one in rust and one in go at the moment. The dependency trees are entirely different beasts, with most of the stuff on the go project covered by the stdlib whereas I think the rust project is over 400 despite asking for just rusqlite (sqlite), clap (cli), ratatui (tui), and tauri (gui), the last of which is by far the worst offender but even without it, it’s still close on 100 which is crazy. If there were (and maybe there are, I just haven’t found them) decently maintained alternatives to the rust crates that actually have a sane dependency approach, I’d feel much better. I’m just trying to not shai hulud my system, and the rust-web people seem to want to turn cargo into npm in that regard.
Note that many Rust libraries consist of multiple crates, which all end up in the dependency graph. This makes the number of dependencies seem higher than it actually is: the separate crates have the same maintainers and are often part of the same upstream git repo.
I agree with the general sentiment though. Rust also has a lot of crates that are stuck semi-unmaintained at some 0.x version, often with no better alternative.
Unfortunately the 0.x version has pervaded because of community cargo culting claiming that versioning is easier with 0.x than with major version numbers > 0. Personally I find that hard to believe, especially given packages like Tokio and anyhow (still at v1) make it work and there’s others that are >v1.
That is to say 0.x doesn’t necessarily mean unmaintained, it can also mean “I don’t want to have to think about how to version APIs / make guarantees about APIs). Eg reqwest is very widely used and actively maintained yet is still at v0.13.
> claiming that versioning is easier with 0.x than with major version numbers > 0
I think it's less that versioning is claimed to be easier with 0.x versions, and more that some people have got into their heads that 1.0 signals either "permanently stable" or "no new versions for several years" and they don't want to commit to that yet.
I do wish more crates would 1.0 (and then 2.0, etc).
There is good reasons to break out projects into multiple crates. It makes reusing functionality elsewhere easier. It makes it easier to reason about behavior. It makes it easier for LLMs to understand (either working within the crate or consuming as an api surface.) So you end up with projects that have multiple crates inside the same workspace and it really blows up dependency count.
The other very important reason for splitting into crates is compile times. Crates are the "compilation unit" and you often get more build paralellism with more crates.
> rusqlite (sqlite), clap (cli), ratatui (tui), and tauri (gui)
Does any language, except like Java, exist with a standard library comprising matching that?
Also, keep in mind that Tauri itself is 14 crates, where each one shows up in your build tree.
https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/blob/dev/Cargo.toml
And Ratatui is 6:
https://github.com/ratatui/ratatui/blob/main/Cargo.toml
Python has sqlite3[0], curses (tui) [1], and tkinter[2] in the stdlib.
[0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/sqlite3.html
[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/curses.html
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/tkinter.html
And ironically with the exception of the python sqlite3 module, the rust alternatives are much higher quality, IMO.
Does anyone even use tkinter in modern times anyways?
I wouldn't start a company behind it but tkinter is perfectly fine for basic guis. It has its quirks but who doesn't?
Right. The famous stdlib where once good libraries go to die so you instead depend on the latest community replacement choice.
Also argparse for Clap:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html
To highlight the problem for Python: Python's standard library has getopt, optparse, and now argparse. I don't think they set out to offer 3 argument parsing libs, one of which is marked superseded, but here we are.
At least in the case of sqlite, rusqlite pulled in 5 or so in total whereas Go had a single library that was a thin wrapper around sqlite, and integrated into the stdlib interface. Many fewer deps
Edit: counts are fair, that’s still hundreds unaccounted
Package management is the bane of nearly every language/technology
Nobody has "solved" it, and I don't think that there will ever be one (never say never, though, right?)
For Go we rely on developers of libraries to adhere to the semver versioning scheme accurately, and we cannot "pin" versions (a personal bugbear of mine)
There is a couple of workarounds - using SHAs not unlike the git commit hash to provide a pseudo version, and, vendoring (which is a cache of known dependencies - which brings with it cache management problems)
I had the misfortune of having to use Python with a virtual env on the weekend - it did not end well, and reminded me why I migrated away from Python.
Look at Perl (cpan) Java (maven, gradle) Ruby (gems) Go (dep, glide, vgo, modules) Rust (cargo) Node (npm, yarn, etc)
OSes too Redhat (yum, rpm, etc) Debian (apt) Ubuntu (snap - god why????)
And so on
> I had the misfortune of having to use Python with a virtual env on the weekend - it did not end well, and reminded me why I migrated away from Python.
I see this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't match my experience at all.
In my decade-old bubble of using Python professionally, I've never had an issue with virtualenvs. The few issues I might've had with dependency resolution must be so far in the past that I don't remember. But that's not strictly about virtualenvs. Likewise, pip could be clunky, but we don't have to deal with it anymore.
My niche is mostly backend. Other Python niches must be considerably worse in this regard.
Actually with Go modules you are always pinning dependencies. What’s in your go.mod is what is used. If your go.mod needs to be updated because a dependency wants to bring in a newer version of a transient dependency, the go.mod has to be modified (by the go command, not by you)
> we cannot "pin" versions
you can? that's why go.sum exists. you can also use the replace directive for more advanced scenarios.
Nix solved it. Languages could choose to adopt Nix as their packaging system.
It did and didn't. Nix tools for building language-specific packages almost always wrap the language build tool/package manager. This can be easy or hard, depending on how onerous the build tool is for vendoring libraries.
What Nix and build tools need to agree on is a specification or protocol for "building a software dependency tree". Like, I should be able to say 'builder = cargo' in a Nix derivation and Cargo should be able to pick up everything it needs from the build environment. Alas, there is simply far too much tied up in nixpkg's stdenv for this to be viable, so we have magic stdenv builder behavior via hooks when a build tool is included in nativeBuildInputs.
Thanks for writing this, I learned something
I think one of the key problems too is that a system level dependency is managed by people dedicated to ensuring the chaotic nature of the package they are responsible for conforms to the way the OS they are maintaining for has proscribed.
There's no real way to do that at a language level - we cannot have "Go has determined the package you are trying to fix has not met the versioning requirements proscribed so you cannot submit the patch to fix it"
What language dependencies do is what OSes would think of as "unofficial versioning" that is, an OS will let you install and run an unofficial version of some lib (we've all been there, right, multiple versions of some core library because one doesn't work with whatever you are trying to install), but they will not manage it at all.
In theory, but not in practice
The stdlib is the place where good ideas go to die.
And then you have httplib3 followed by httplib4.
In other words: I highly prefer the Rust approach.
It doesn't matter a lot whether I rely on the stdlib or another dependency to me.
It's a dependency after all.
People think just because it's the stdlib it's somehow better quality or better maintained, but these are orthogonal concepts.
In the end it depends solely on resources.
Sure, the stdlib may get more of these, but it may also grow fat and unmaintainable...
That's an interesting viewpoint, but one I've noticed is less prevalent in other languages.
The c# guys at microsoft created an enormous stdlib, and the overwhelming majority of it is pretty good. The outliers being of course older stuff they've never really had time to upgrade. And they don't seem to be afraid to deprecate stuff, every major version brings a couple of minor breaking changes. But it all seems to work out just fine somehow
I’d argue that this is wrong. Having a conservative standard library that aims to contain most things most people need is preferable to third party libraries in 90%. For the 10% that isn’t covered to your liking by the standard library you can turn to third parties. You get both a practical standard library and third party options.
I did a lot of cryptography over the past couple of years. Go has that in the standard library. For the last decade and a half cryptography is something that every developer has to deal with at some point, and it NOT being the awful pain that it is in just about any other language, is a good thing. Sure, it does not contain every algorithm and mechanism in the world, but it contains everything you need for 90% of cases. That means that most of the time you don’t have to do the extra work of ensuring you have an out if the library you depend on should go away/bad, bugs will be fixed, people speak a common language and you don’t have to do twice the work in terms of risk assessment.
People keep forgetting that you have to evaluate these things in the real world. In practical real-world situations. The real world is not about what works in theory but what actually provides value for actual people working on actual projects.
I’m not arguing on quality of the library, I’m arguing on not getting pwned by the sheer number of transitive dependencies
The problem is that trust shouldn't be so binary. We should have ways to increase trust without needing to resort to the standard library. There was an effort to do this at some point in rust but the idea was sadly not well received. Maybe it'll end up reviving itself with modern supply chain concerns.
The idea is that there could form some groups of well maintained crates that only depend on each other and have a similar amount of oversight. This actually naturally happens in c++ because grabbing dependencies is so painful, but it makes dependencies more trustworthy. For instance boost, absl, folly, etc.
I've harped on this for years, but few devs seem to grasp the concept that less dependencies is better than more. Especially library authors.
It's only now that the supply chain problems with npm are becoming beyond obvious that we are seeing devs come around to this notion (leftpad should have been the canary in the coal mine).
The javascript ecosystem has corrupted far too many other programming ecosystems. The notion of "just make a small package like is-even" is really the core of the problem. But also people making libraries often have the wrong mentality about that process. They think of it like they are making an application (So why not just pull in a bunch of random deps). Every dependency a library brings in should have a serious conversation and analysis on "how much work would it be to just do this functionality here". And if it's not that much, then preference should be to duplicate, not depend.
If you look at the number of authors vs the number of dependencies the gap narrows but doesn't disappear. Many of the most commonly used crates are written by members of the rust foundation amd are used in the tools themselves. But it is always a concern. I'm looking forward to the upcoming option to forbid versions newer than N days at the project level. But just manually only y updating versions when you need a new feature or there is a cve works pretty well.
The stdlib isn't necessarily better, but it's always there. To use Python as an example, I tend to prefer requests to urllib2, as do most programmers. But I've absolutely been in scenarios where all I could get was the stdlib, and having urllib2 saved my ass. I think it's extremely important for the stdlib to be batteries included, even if they aren't the best versions of those batteries on the market.
Interesting. I'm not very familiar with Go. What is the equivalent for Tauri in Go's stdlib?
Would it make sense to continue using Go for the frontend and doing only the backend in Rust for your user case?
wails, there's wails3-alpha which some people said is even better than tauri
Thanks. Is wails a Go stdlib component, as GP implied or is it third party?
tauri isn't stdlib and neither is wails
Why is it worse to import a number of other packages that provide exactly the functionality you need, than to have a large standard library that provides some but not all of the functionality you need, requiring you to still use some large dependencies?
For example, security. See all the supply chain attacks from the past couple of years.
LLM writing tells are getting more subtle, but they still jump off the page for me, in particular the word "genuine:"
tbc I don't think the article was fully AI-generated, just AI-assisted. If so, the author did a genuinely good job of it! No one else is commenting on it, so clearly it didn't detract much from the substance. It's just weird that this is becoming increasingly common, and increasingly hard to detect.I don't know about the author's background, but there is now a generation of non-native programmers who learned to write English by using LLMs for corrections (yeah including this comment).
The irony is that studies show LLM detectors have a much higher false-positive rate for non-native speakers [1]. If most of what you read stems from LLMs, you end up writing like an LLM.
[1]: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-detectors-biased-against-no...
> but there is now a generation of non-native programmers who learned to write English by using LLMs for corrections (yeah including this comment)
LLM writing has not been overly abundant for more than a couple years. I don't know where you got the idea that an entire generation of people have already learned to write like an LLM.
This is completely off topic now but, "it's worth being precise about ..." is a much stronger AI-ism than the usage of the word genuine.
Perhaps more people are using AI as part of an editorial process that is largely driven by what they wish to convey but where they have stopped fighting the AI on its preferred style. It’s supremely annoying when AI updates your prose with its own formulation despite plenty of instructions otherwise. Too often AIs mangle meaning which can be especially worrisome as it’s not easy to catch subtle word/grammar changes that dramatically shift meaning. Overall though, defects aside, for me, and only very recently, it’s been more helpful than not. I think AIs will continue to improve in this regard and be better editorial partners. For competent writings, it won’t replace human authorship or expert review.
Specifically, I’ve recently used ChatGPT for legal/administrative writing where the AI seems to be trained on a large corpus and seems to know the conventions and vocabulary well; a lawyer who reviewed the work had important corrections. Before AI, I would have sought model filings and have had less success at emulating the genre. So it’s lowered time/cost somewhat but it takes lots of diligence. By default, current AI outputs seems intelligible but are still really far off the mark. I’ve found a structured interview is a good way to start rather than jumping into draft generation.
I have to agree here, but I'm not sure why. I don't have any clue what makes something sound AI generated or not. I got to about here "Go is clearly working for a lot of people," -- before I became suspicious that it was AI-assisted (but also maybe I'm wrong and it's not AI-assisted, I am very bad at telling). It's more about vibes (ironically) than anything else in particular. If something "sounds" AI-assisted then I instantly lose interest even if the article itself is otherwise fine. I wish people were more ok with writing their own thoughts with how it comes to them.
Agreed. In fact, one of the things I now watch for is my mind starting to "slide off" the text, or finding myself re-reading a section multiple times. It's like the brain subconsciously recognizes a lack of substance even if we can't point to a specific tell.
Author here. I use the term 'genuinely' too often, but that's just me. I do that when speaking here as well. Suffice to say that I'm not a native speaker, so that might have something to do with it. I will go over the text and replace some of those. thx.
My own iA Writer flags are great, love, hope, literally, "but,", and genuinely. Sigh. They just sneak out there.
And many others. I felt it too
And it’s a good contrast with ‘just fcking use Go’ article he linked.
Go article is much more human. I love that and would choose a human centered language and human centered culture over LLM-centered everything every time
I guess I am just old
And tables with comparisons! Nobody makes a table by hand if it’s not packed with value. Tables in this article are not
the psychosis has gone off the charts! anything that sounds odd to someone can now be labelled as an LLM text "smell"?
why scoff over someone doing assisted writing? i might age myself but kids back in the day would try to sound better by using synonym feature in ms word (or through web thesaurus) for their assignment essays. this all looks familiar to the same practice, now only made more accessible.
There's nothing in the comment you're replying to that could be described as "scoffing." What are you on about?
I feel the opposite, where AI hype is so extreme that merely someone pointing out an article may have had LLM involvement prompts a response like this. Someone incredulously painting people as ivory tower nose thumbers. If anything, it pushes me away from LLM writing more.
I also don't see how you can compare finding a synonym for a word to having your entire writing voice determined for you.
I also wonder if it's possible that this is just "blog-speak"
The author of this article has what seems like it could be a relatively thriving consulting business, so he probably writes more to advertise his services than anything else. That kind of writing surely lends itself to a particular writing style, which is a non-insignificant chunk of the kind of writing that LLMs were trained on.
While reading the article, I remember feeling that I'm reading an LLM generated sentence a few times, but in general, this specific article look like an example of acceptable LLM usage to me. I wouldn't call it "AI slop".
It is, if I may say that, _genuinely_ hard to use LLM assist and not make the text look like LLM generated. Even when I write an email in gmail and it gives its suggestions to make the text better, each one individually makes perfect sense, but when I click a few of them, the whole email now looks like AI slop, so I would normally undo the changes, going back to my imperfect hand-written non-optimized version.
I think the whole post is AI generated. The author could have given a draft as input and perhaps edited the output in a few places.
Take this paragraph as example:
> Go got generics in 1.18, and they’re useful, but the implementation has constraints (no methods with type parameters, GC shape stenciling, occasional surprising performance characteristics). Rust generics monomorphize, each instantiation produces specialized code with zero runtime cost. Combined with traits, this gives you real zero-cost abstractions.
Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. I would expect that kind of writing from very specialized books or papers, not from a blog post. Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
> Every sentence says something. Every sentence is important and holds its weight. [...] Also, it makes the post harder (and more boring) to read.
I actually prefer that style of writing! (When it's not AI-generated ofc.) And I also try to use it in my technical blog posts. I usually re-read my drafts asking myself: "Does the reader actually care about this? Is this sentence adding something or is it just fluff?"
And actually I feel like AI text usually produces more fluff, or anyway I notice it more, but I see how it can make the result "robotic and boring".
His stuff about generics in Go is also wrong. He says that Go's standard library "avoids" them. He forgot that it has `slices.SortFunc()`. He forgot about Go `Seq`. Maybe because he has stopped using Go and is no longer that familiar.
I've noticed LLM writing over the past year has had an unusually high tendency to talk about surfaces and, in particular, substrates. I don't expect LLM generated text to be anything other than rich with clichés. I simply wish we would all demonstrate a better editorial hand so we weren't reading the same voice, over and over.
I already use Rust and don't have experience with Go, so this article maybe isn't super for me.
I do have one nitpick though: Stating that data races are "caught at compile time" in Rust feels like it is overstating the case, at least a little. It sounds a bit like its implying Rust can also handle things like mutual lock starvation, or other concurrency issues. When that's simply not the case. I know "data race" is technically a formal term, with a decently narrow scope, yet I still think it could be a bit clearer about it.
One reason I like Go is the fast compile. Rust really slows you down. Esp in days of AI when agents are building/testing in cycles.
If verbosity is a main stickler, this is coming to golang 1.28 which will cut it down drastically:
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12854#issue-110104883
Being able to just return {}, err when returning an empty struct from a function sounds really exciting and encouraging to use pointers less, which is really good for nil safety if anything
I know general consensus on this is that it is good, but I hate this. The fact that both assignments do completely different things (with the map one doing heap allocs!) is insane. This would've been much better if it only allowed for anonymous structs.
That actually looks great. Thanks a lot for the link.
I wrote Go professionally for years. Moved to Rust and couldn't be happier. There are some annoying syntax quirks but they are minor.
After writing web services, GUI apps and terminal apps professionally in Rust, I honestly struggle to see a use case for other languages.
If you have a green field, by all means write it in rust. If you have a brown field, and a functional profitable system, rewrite the parts that need rewriting in the original language, whatever that is, and carry on. Make your systems better in small measurable ways, with the language you know and a team you trust to implement it all. Anything else is a wasteful religious argument.
I don't see any reasons to use Rust when your team successfully shipped and is confortable with C#/Java/Go ect ...
If anyone one comes and tells me we need to rewrite in a new language from any of those modern languages, other than you are dealing with something cannot wait for GC.
That is a signal that person is lacking purpose in their job or life.
GC pauses are not the only reason. At the very least, raw compute performance and lower memory usage are also valid reasons in some contexts.
I liked Rust before running a benchmark, but the gap between how effectively most LLMs write in Rust vs Go was still surprisingly large to me (especially in agentic harnesses where they can fix the initial environment issues). I've become a pretty big Rust evangelist after seeing that. We've had a lot of success writing batch processing tools in Rust to be called by our existing codebase, but haven't attempted a full production migration... yet.
I will say that many of the issues with Go in the article, especially re: nil handling are increasingly solved by thorough coding reviews with Codex. Better to not have the issue in the first place, sure, but these kinds of security bugs are becoming optional to developers who put in at least as much effort to review and understand code as they put into the initial design and execution.
Language data at https://gertlabs.com/rankings?mode=agentic_coding
The detailed compiler errors and strong type system makes the change -> compile -> change loop simple for agents to handle. Rust provides very strong rails it forces users on to. Codex always manages to get something to compile.
The downside is that maybe it should fail sometimes when an idiomatic approach isn’t viable… instead it will implement something stupid that compiles and meets the request.
The weakness of Rust WRT LLMs is compilation times. LLMs code faster and hence spend relatively more time waiting for compilation than humans do, so on reasonably sized projects (e.g. 100k+ lines) Rust's ~10x slower compilation starts showing up as a bottleneck. If you're writing some critical infrastructure it makes sense to pay that cost, but if you're writing some internal service that's not publicly exposed to the internet then development velocity may be a bigger concern. (I'd argue that slow compilation also influences human development velocity, but for some reason developers very rarely try to quantify this.)
>The weakness of Rust WRT LLMs is compilation times.
That's a more tractable problem then basically anything else around LLMs and programming. We're definitely getting more cores in the avg machine judging by roadmaps & leaks
10x slower is like an extra second, if that, for compilation times for the sizes of changes an agent like codex makes.
Meanwhile.. Java's still around. Modern, and fits the LLM paradigm quite well. It's not going to be as amazing or fast as Rust is, but close.
> as amazing or fast as Rust
For cli tools, game engines, etc. certainly so. But what about monoliths? Do we have enough data to say Rust handles long-running monolith apps exposing web and other network services better than the JVM with its hot spot? I haven’t come to any stats on that matter, yet.
If you can encode your request processing patterns in statically sized types, then you can get the same high-level memory allocation behavior on both platforms. Arguably Rust makes this a bit easier. (Though I have no idea how much of the concepts of mechanical sympathy made it to mainstream Java.)
If you have some kind of super vague complicated patchwork of plugins that all contribute to processing, then the JVM seems to be the more convenient choice.
https://martinfowler.com/articles/mechanical-sympathy-princi...
Indirect evidence, but parts of AWS and cloudflare have been running Rust in production for close to a decade now and neither company looks to be itching to move services back to Java.
> other network services better than the JVM with its hot spot?
JVM hotspot optimization is just band-aid for something Rust does always everywhere naturally? Assuming that you use lifetimes etc properly and not going to Arc rampage.
Rust:
Java Java's string concat is faster than rust's offerings.I would be careful with this benchmark even thought it shows JIT efficiency. This is a special case which might not really reflect realworld - string was static? What if you use random string?
> You literally cannot dereference an Option without acknowledging the None case. Whole categories of pager-duty incidents disappear.
This is at the very least misleading, given that you can use unwrap.
Regarding error handling: will a parser error in the config return an error that includes the name of the file that’s failed to parse? That’s the kind of useful context that I add to errors in Go.
The difference is, unwrap will stick out like a sore thumb, and it’s opt-in. You explicitly tell "this may panic".
As for error handling, this kind of enrichment is usually left to the caller (that is, the end application), with error libraries like anyhow where you can add arbitrary string contexts to an error. You would end up writing `Config::load(path).with_context(|| format!("Failed to load configuration file {path}"))?`.
I write purely Go at $dayjob, but I write purely Rust in my projects.
I have a huge list of things that I have in Rust that I would like in Go, but I don't have a single thing I am missing from Go in Rust.
I grow tired of golang "dumb it down" approach as I find it actually just shifts more and more work onto me.
Is anyone in a different position? What does Go have that rust does not?
The simplicity of Go is a feature…
I have to come to believe that Go is simple for the compiler, not necessarily for the programmer.
`nil` is not simpler than references and Option<T>. lack of enum is complicating my code. automatic type promotion is a hidden bug waiting to happen and preventing proper strong types, lack of `?` is making things verbose. struct tags look simple, until you realize they are hiding a ton of code and creating a ton of corner cases that you still have to manually check, and are completely nonstandard (hello json and `default`, `omitempty/omitzero` etc...). `nil` and interfaces? it took decades to recognize that Generics simplify things for the programmer, no Send/Sync like in rust makes concurrent code more error prone, etc, etc...
And that is without talking about the standard library, where "simple" somehow becomes having `url.Parse` that accepts everything without errors. http body `nil` vs `NoBody`. Who hasn't had to write the Nth implementation of a pipe between reader and writer? Apparently most libraries hear "simple" and think "dumb". We could go on for hours.
Golang is much easier to learn, and rust does remain much more complicated. I don't thing golang hit his target of "simplicity" honestly.
Not sure the article is … accurate? Go has a large standard library. Rust leans on third party cargo libraries which fall into the supply chain attack and has a small standard library. Anyways, that feels immediately biased in the article. Also 11% use Rust? I don’t see that penetration in real long term products. Sure lots of tui apps these days but not things that you can make money working on.
> Also 11% use Rust?
These percentages are from the JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem Report 2024 on the question "Which programming languages have you used in the last 12 months?"[0].
I think a better datapoint would be the "Primary Programming Languages" in the 2025 report[1] where Rust sits at 4% and Go at 8%.
[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2024/#KeDHWJ
[1]: https://devecosystem-2025.jetbrains.com/tools-and-trends
Quite new to Go, so sorry in advance for a stupid question:
> "Go got generics in 1.18 (March 2022), thirteen years after the language shipped. They are useful, but they feel tacked on, and in practice they have most of the downsides of a generic type system without delivering the upsides you’d expect coming from Rust, Haskell, or even modern C++."
The problems with Go generics have now largely been solved, haven't they? Is this comment from the author still applicable?
That's the thing, a programming language is not something static, it evolves. For instance, people are working on adding generic methods for the next release cycles.
And what the article complains about is by design, not a bug. It is a tradeoff made to avoid bloat. In any case, given the future possibilities, I'd bet on Go.
If anything, the language is just slower to evolve because every language change means the tooling needs to catch up. And now llms would have to catch up. ChatGPT is still using Go 1.23 for instance...
> There’s no built-in goroutine-style preemption. Long CPU-bound work in an async task starves the executor; you offload to tokio::task::spawn_blocking or rayon instead.
I don't know why anyone uses spawn_blocking for CPU-bound tasks. It's clearly designed for blocking IO tasks. There's a reason why Erlang cordons them separately into Dirty CPU and Dirty IO schedulers.
"services that your organization relies on, that have high uptime requirements, that are critical to your business"
Kind of funny when your Rust service runs on Kubernetes.
Which in turn relies on a stack largely written in, shock and horror, C, such as the Linux kernel, libc, openssl, nginx, etc. etc.
Even if you believe language X to be the bees knees, are you going to stop using it until everything below it in the computing stack has been rewritten in X? Of course not.
i like go because it's simple and just works. i like the error handling, if err != nil return err, i like the philosophy to focus using stdlib instead choose which libraries are the best for doing x. i like how go handle the concurrency like using channel or sync.waitgroup. i am very biased but someday i will also learn rust
I'll stick to this advice: https://kerkour.com/rust-backend-services-problems
I do like using Rust quite a bit, but the presence of arbitrary build-time code in build.rs is very risky until we get better at implementing dev-time sandboxing.
I would add that Rust also has naming guidelines and sticking to them removes or at least minimizes the occurrence of another common topic of discussions on PRs/reviews.
In the article, if you were to mention & follow them GetUser() in Go becomes user() in Rust[1], not get_user().
[1] https://rust-lang.github.io/api-guidelines/naming.html#gette...
perhaps the oncall is better if you write your own services, but as an SRE / ops person who has to run other people's services, rust ones just generally seem to be worse: logs that are so verbose but seem to tell you nothing, statsd seems to be the only choice for metrics, contextless errors everywhere, memory "leaks" (more like runaway memory use) that the developers swear are impossible because it's rust, overall just less mature across services written by both in house and oss teams
I was a Go engineer for years and have shipped a lot of Go. I never properly learned Rust.
Over the past year I've been using AI to write small Rust tools for myself — I barely read the code, and honestly it just works.
But for serious projects I expect to maintain long-term, I still pick Go. Today I want code I can actually own and reason about myself.
Give it a year or two and I probably won't be writing code by hand at all. Once the AI owns the code anyway, that reason disappears — and at that point Rust's guarantees win. So I suspect I'll end up leaning Rust.
> But for serious projects I expect to maintain long-term, I still pick Go.
Maintenance is a big win for Go imho - that you can go to code you wrote a year or more ago - and jump right back into it, with little-to-no re-learning curve. The syntax is not providing cover for complexity bombs, and the tools keep the workflow simple and quick.
How is it with Rust ? Does one's own old code remain maintainable ?
Great writeup. The section on error handling differences is spot on, especially how Rust's Result type changes the way you structure application flow.
Very nice write up! I am a fan of Rust and have little exposure to Go. That said, a couple of very minor points:
cargo audit is not built-in, it is 3rd party. (The comparison table near the top isn't clear about that, and the following text stating more is built-in for Rust than for Go might be confusing. I would suggest adding an asterisk to mark built-ins in that table.)
cargo watch has been in "maintenance mode" for some time. The author of that suggests cargo bacon instead.
I would think that you might have a better time going from go to zig. You would have to provide a pattern for implementing the interface model go uses.
What are the benefits of moving from Go to Zig?
It seems like you lose a lot (automatic memory safety, simple language, easy concurrency) and gain very little.
Golang is an amazing runtime with a bad language, one that conflates simple with easy. I view it the same way I view Java: a fine choice for a corporation, but nothing to love. Although Java’s gotten a lot better lately.
For me having the proper tool for the job trumps loving. I don't have to love the language, I have to love the process and the end result.
It is also easier to make your code deterministic with Rust vs with Go, which is incredibly useful if you need to perform deterministic simulation testing + property-based testing. I recently wrote a Postgres-to-Iceberg data mirroring tool [1] in Go, but I ported it to Rust because I wanted the ability perform DST without fighting Go's runtime [2]. But if the domain is not critical that warrants DST, I would still pick Go over Rust any day.
[1] https://github.com/polynya-dev/pg2iceberg
[2] https://www.polarsignals.com/blog/posts/2024/05/28/mostly-ds...
Anybody who actually moved a set of services from Go to Rust? I've heard that in practice Rust uses more memory than Go for web services. When I ask LLMs I get the same answer as in the article. A 30-50% reduction but then also claims on how much memory Go uses. Which is about 5-10x more than our average service use.
> It confuses easiness with simplicity
A lot of libs/packages in Go's stdlib also has this problem. They like to package everything in a very tight interface (very obvious example includes crypto/* and http), without exposing implementation detail to the end user.
Doing this of course has it's benefits, but if the feature provided by the stdlib slightly don't fit you needs, then you might have to write your own (potentially unsafe and/or less performant) one from zero.
Rust is great overall, but there's some oddities. For example their lib.rs / `mod` is very, very unintuitive, it felt overdesigned and unnecessarily complex (just see [their book]). I like what Go or Java did to their lib/package systems, it's much better that way.
[their book]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch07-05-separating-mod...
I've come to hate hiding internals. Put them in a namespace which makes it clear there's no API stability guarantees, but make them available if needed.
As you note it's just pain with no gain to properly hide them. Users can't readily work around bugs or extend functionality.
I've swinged between Go and Rust for my personal projects multiple times. For work, it is decided by the management so not my problem.
The biggest gripe I have with Go is the lack of *any* compile time check for mutex. Even C++ has extensions like ABSL_GUARDED_BY. For a language so proud on concurrency, it is strange not to have any guardrails.
The guardrails are channels.
If you have a mutex on a structure, linters such as are packaged into Goland will catch oversights quite effectively.
If you are using fancier concurrency structures, you should consider channels instead.
Channels are not for everything. Plenty of mutex cases cannot be rewritten as channels, or will be very unwieldy so. In fact, every large Go project I have seen uses mutex here or there.
Theoretically you can use channels to simulate a mutex, but I agree with you there are use cases where a mutex makes more sense. They are even used in the standard library, for instance to implement sync.Once.
But generally I would agree that if you need to code parallel execution, channels are a good way to do it, because you can avoid race conditions if you share data only over channels. The biggest problem is that a lot of people don't understand, that channels with a buffer larger than 1 are a sign of problems in the architecture.
There is a type of parallel programming with workers for specific functions, that always leads to performance issues. The problem is you need to right-guess the distribution of work, when you have to define the amount of workers for a specific function. At least one go routine for one request is a much better approach than function-specific workers.
Read migrating from one hype to another, developers never learn or change, do they??
It feels like yesterday when every single project was moving to Go just because it was the new hype, that was until Rust was born.
We are already seeing projects dumping migration to Rust because the grass is not always greener on the other side.
We will be seeing this again, "Migrating from Rust to XYZ"
Go has warts, but projects like Lisette (https://lisette.run/) try to fix those. Go has bare syntax, as lack some (modern?) features. But imho it has a superb runtime, eg has a WAY better concurrency story than what you see in Rust.
The datetime to string conversions in Go are devil's spawn.
Share some examples?
The "when to enforce it" framing is what sticks with me. Go and Rust agree on safety, concurrency, simple deployment, but Go says "catch it in review" and Rust says "catch it before it compiles." The right answer depends entirely on how expensive a production incident is for you vs. how expensive slower iteration is.
And TLA+ and Lean say "catch it before you write any code".
> but Go says "catch it in review"
So, in production?
It's AI slop, it makes no sense
What about AI assisted migration?
There was a signal to assist c++ to plain and simple C AI mass migration.
Removing any languages with ultra-complex syntax towards simple and plain C is always a good thing.
Some years ago Go was all the hype rage.
Now Rust is the new Go.
I find that very confusing.
Some folks already dropped rust and went with zig. Honestly, to me it seems only devs at the peak density of the programming bell curve, are the ones arguing about “the better” programming language.
I
Go has shorter and more predictable GC pauses. If a reference count drops to zero in Rust, it may take an unbounded time to free all the things it refers to (recursively if necessary).
I still prefer having deterministic control over when the free occurs.
For example, I can transmit the response to the client and then free the memory afterwards so they're not kept waiting.
What if you have many clients that are constantly coming in, when do you decide to free the memory after sending their respective responses?
Can't use that approach for a GUI.
I never feel rust learning curve is steep. It is just everything is awkward, even more awkward than modern C++.
JVM languages to Rust, I understand it somehow.
But Go to Rust???
It does not make any sense.
> Under heavy allocation, P99 latency tails are noticeably worse than a Rust equivalent that simply doesn’t allocate on the hot path.
Lmao so not an equivalent then? Standard glibc malloc, which is default in rust, will also similarly degrade albeit for different reasons.
I still think rustfmt made a mistake by going with four spaces. It's basically inferior for everything except forcing everyone to use the same indentation width, which is actually a downside, since I constantly encounter two-space indent codebases that I can't read and also can't change to four spaces because it's not tabs. Also translating spaces to tabs visually is undecidable thanks to alignment, while the inverse is not true. Ugh.
I've got a `.rustfmt.toml` file in all my repos with
Yep, but because it's not the default, plenty of ecosystem tooling just does not properly track the two separate types of leading whitespace (indentation vs alignment) and will happily conflate every tab_width characters of alignment with an indentation level (which is grossly incorrect). I don't have an example off the top of my head because I run very far each time it happens.
>Go developers don’t usually come to Rust because Go is “too slow.” For most backend workloads, Go is plenty fast. People are generally a bit frustrated with Go’s verbose error handling, the danger of segmentation faults from nil pointers, and the lack of generics (for a long time) or any sophisticated type system features, such as enums or traits. Interfaces are not a worthy replacement for traits, and the Go standard library has some weird gaps, such as the lack of a Set type. (The idiomatic workaround is map[T]struct{}, which works fine in practice but is a tell that the type system isn’t quite carrying its weight.)
If those are issues, I rather use C#/.NET than expose both developers and AI agents to a cognitive overload.
However, those are not big issues to me, and at least in the present day, Go seems to excel at the things it is supposed to: backend and microservices. Sure, you can find some small issues with Go if you are really nitpicking, but you can find bigger issues with other languages. Sure, Go is boring as f..k, but I don't care and the agents don't mind, they love Go. Most people prefer reading Go than reading Rust. Go allows a fast way to production and for many startups and small companies, that matters a lot.
I don't hate Rust, and even use it - for where I think it makes sense, but for backend and microservices, Go seems a better fit.
As always, this is an opinion, derived from my personal experience, take it with a grain of salt, your experience might be different.
The article seems to be just a way to say "Rust is better" - and it fails to do so by spreading misinformation such as the channels part (https://corrode.dev/learn/migration-guides/go-to-rust/#chann...) or making a fair comparison of pprof vs Rust's flamegraph.
It also skips entirely over debugging (delve vs gdb), IDE support, ecosystem (why the hell does Rust have N async runtimes?!), statically linking and so on.
A comparison between the performance of RLS / rust-analyzer (painfully slow) and gopls would be enough to kill the whole argument about developer happiness and productivity.
It even passes traits as a "reason to switch" to Rust - where in fact it would probably be a reason (IMHO) not to use it (together with lifetimes).
I think both languages are amazing, so a migration Go -> Rust (or Rust -> Go) makes no sense most of the time.
I've written code in both for a while now, so I know the pain and advantages of both.
For example, Go sucks at microcontroller stuff - in fact it's not even Go officially (see my presentation about porting "Go" to an ESP32-S3 [1]) - whereas Rust is amazing and even has a strong project behind (https://esp.rs) and amazing tooling (probe-rs & co).
What's also not addressed here is the Go ecosystem. The Go packages are one `go mod add` away (pkgs.go.dev) and the module owner guarantees v1 backwards compatibility for the whole lifetime of the module. This means that, no matter what happens, your dependencies will always be up-to-date with no migration struggle. This makes creating stuff for anything around the Kubernets ecosystem a breeze, you can literally import the types from another project and start your integration right away.
The most valuable part of the article seems the link to the opposite view (https://blainsmith.com/articles/just-fucking-use-go/). They're equally biased, but one is more straightforward than the other.
All in all, it's not a fair comparison and it's very biased (which is fair) - at the same time I think the idea behind the article is "wrong". If you find yourself migrating from Go to Rust (or vice versa), you're likely doing something wrong - and the performance gain is not the reason you're really doing it for.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18jWccV-F2FguZiB5gXLk...
TLDR:
>The other prior worth disclosing: I run a Rust consultancy; of course I’m biased!
Rust is great. However in an agentic world go will win. Look no further than incremental build times. This, combined with high token costs mean that for a given application it simply will cost more to to write it in Rust than Go.
This can easily be justified for many usecases, but for your vanilla crud app, do you really need Rust?
Per the article, you are getting 20-50% better more performance with Rust. Not worth it unless your team was already fluent in Rust. Now consider a scenario where your team uses AI exclusively to code, now you are spending more time and tokens waiting around to consume large rust builds. As far as I know this is an inherent property of Rust to have its safety guarantees.
I think Rust makes sense for a lot of cases, but for a small web service, overkill and unnecessary imho. If someone ported their crud app from Go to Rust I would question their priorities.
Again I am speaking more in terms of software engineering economics than anything else. Yes, I know in a perfect world Rust binaries are smaller, performance is better and code more “correct”, but the world is hardly perfect. People have to push code quickly, iterate quickly. Teams have churn, Rust, frankly is alien for many, etc.
Because the agentic world involves the generation of so much code that gets harder to review, I would think the compile-time guarantees of Rust would make it a better option.
This is true if the token budget and time are not taken into account. In practice though, waiting minutes instead of seconds per build multiplied by prompt and again by change adds up very fast.
Incremental Rust builds are almost never minutes (on recentish hardware)
A quick measurement on my web browser project with almost 600 dependencies:
- A clean "cargo check" was 31s
- An incremental "cargo check" with a meaningful change was 1.5s
Building is a little slower:
- A clean "cargo build" was 56.01s
- An incremental "cargo build" was 4s
But I find that LLMs are mostly calling "check" on Rust code.
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That's on an Apple M1 Pro. The latest M4/M5 machines as ~twice as fast.
I mean i wouldnt call a 100% a little slower wrt check vs build. In any case, the more you change the longer the incremental check or build will take.
1.5s for a massive project, on a laptop,like the OP said is still barely anything in the context of agentic coding. It’s less than a single percentage point of the total time in the loop, even if the agent has to compile multiple times.
This is cope.
I do give you that rust is more verbose and thus more token heavy. However that verbosity is meaningful and the LLM would have to spend tokens thinking about the code to understand less verbose languages. So I’d consider that a wash - in some cases it hurts and in some it helps.
We don’t know how massive the project is, but in any case building and immediately building again of course will be fast. How fast is it if all files have a single line changed, for example refactoring a log message?
Not to mention we haven't even gotten to discussing tests.
> in any case building and immediately building again of course will be fast
FWIW, the compile time test above was done comparing consecutive commits. Which in this case happened to have ~3-4 lines changed.
Sure, but when we're talking single-digit seconds it feels not that significant regardless?
My point is that it isn't necessarily that fast. It is relative to the amount of changes and where they were made. For a fair comparison you would also have to present the worst case incremental build time which approaches the full build time (this goes for Go too), which per your own example is nearly a minute for rust.
> For a fair comparison you would also have to present the worst case incremental build time which approaches the full build time (this goes for Go too)
The worst case that would approach a non-incremental build time would be if you were editing a leaf crate. But in almost all cases the leaf crates are 3rd-party dependencies that you would never edit directly.
A real-world worst case is probably more like ~10-20% of an non-incremental builds.
When everyone is armed with Mythos-like hacking ability, it's hard for me to imagine people wouldn't make the tradeoff of security over price.
> spending more time and tokens waiting around
Can you clarify how you're spending tokens on waiting? My understanding is that the LLM isn't actually necessarily doing anything while a build runs. The whole process end to end may take longer for sure (ignoring things like the compiler catching more errors, that's really hard to factor in) but how does that correlate to more tokens?
> The whole process end to end may take longer for sure (ignoring things like the compiler catching more errors, that's really hard to factor in) but how does that correlate to more tokens?
This. rust emits more information both in its output and the syntax itself more complicated requires more tokens.
The cost of verbose compiler output surely cannot compare to the cost of shipping bugs that would've been caught at build time.
Indeed, but is it the case that all bugs you have are those in which would be caught by the compiler? It’s not like rust code inherently is bug free.
Of course, there's plenty of bugs in Rust code still. The fact that safe Rust should be able to statically guarantee entire classes of bugs like data races are impossible is a huge deal, though. We're totally free to have different values when it comes to what matters, but compile time and a verbose toolchain are not high costs for that, to me. I personally would first consider other things like the cognitive overhead of learning to work with the borrow checker.
Your agent doesn't know how to use grep?
> As far as I know this is an inherent property of Rust to have its safety guarantees.
From what I've seen, Rust's strictness is actually a huge win for LLMs, as they get much better feedback on what's wrong with the code. Things like null checking that would be a runtime error in Go are implied by the types / evident in the syntax in Rust.
Can you explain a bit about why token costs would favor Go and not Rust?
Go is more verbose, but Rust have more complex syntax which in practice require more tokens.
The big thing though is because builds are slower, you will end up waiting longer as tests are modified, rebuilt and run. This difference piles up fast.
Waiting longer for tests / builds doesn't have effect on token usage..
Rust's compile time is longer because the compiler does much more. And therefore the binaries are often smaller, start and run faster than Go
> However in an agentic world go will win
This is Silicon Valley fantasy.
lol no
It's a good thing then, that the AI hype is dying outside of ycombinator, the silicon valley and the US
Surely
As someone with a background of consulting in the Stockholm based gaming industry for the last decade+, I have to respectfully disagree. Nearly everyone I know is very much on the hype train. And for good reason too! The capabilities are undeniable!
As is the hype.
You know, shovels are useful, they are just more useful to the shovel manufacturer than the gold diggers.
But in the end it's a cool tool that made it way easier to dig holes and tend to your garden!
Oh yeah, definitely. There has indeed been a lot of hype overestimating the capabilities. People thinking you can one-shot big complex applications with a few paragraphs of descriptions for example. There has also been a lot of anti-hype, or whatever you call it when people seem to believe LLMs don't provide any value for software Dev, basically writing all capabilities off as pure hype.
The truth of course is somewhere in the middle.
It's difficult to tell what people mean when they say hype sometimes.
So you're not using a shovel to maintain your garden?!
I am, but I am no part of any shovel cult.
The capabilities are very much deniable. They do not exist. Using LLMs to write code is either going to make you slower (as you have to review all that code), or make your software suck (because they write bad code and you're choosing to not review it). There's no actual win to be had here.