When I started using Go I was more than sceptical. I had to mirgrate a CLI tool written in Kotlin (still my favorite language) because the memory consumption was to high.
After a while I actually understood why Go is such a successful language / ecosystem:
Go's priority is to make projects easier. It is doing so by all it's smaller and larger features respectivly skipped features. But one soon understands the big picture of the Go team. Go is designed by very experienced devs who knew what is important and what not.
In my Go projects, I don't have to worry about:
- Memory safety
- Tooling
- Performance
- Structure (once I understood the package desgin philosophie)
- Difficult syntax
- Concurrency
- Libraries, as we can do most with the standard lib
- Maturenes and stability
Instead I focus on the things that count:
- Solve the problem at hand
- Create correct, stable and maintable software
And as this was not enough, the Go team comes around the corner with an 5 % average performace gift.
Ah, the desperate Rust promoter crew enters the Go thread ...
Rust is great for language enthusiats doing hobby projects or for learning. The Rust book is great. Rust has great language features.
Having that said, Rust is the right tool for the job for a very small niche. Basically, if you would have used C++ before and don't need much developer reach or mature libraries. And only for the rare cases you really cannot affort a GC (even though Go's GC is highly optimized).
Go on the other hand, is an industrial strength proven and mature general purpose language. It is the best fit for various kind of networking application. Especially APIs, but also infrastructure where you can live with an GC. CLIs are great with Go as well.
If you're working on a professional grade project (where the GC is acceptable), Go is much superior than Rust in all regards.
Rust is advertised for years and years and didn't have it's breakthrough yet. This empirical fact cannot be ignored. There're reasons for this, of course. Some are:
- Writing Rust consumes so much more mental power with so little gain. That mental energy should be directed to solving the problem.
- Go makes everything besides your problem at hand easy. You can focus on solving your problem, not fighting the Borrow Checker
- Rust's ecosystem is not reliable. Many essential libs are one-man-shows. Version 0.1 everywhere.
- Rust is for and by language enthusiats. If you need to rely on libs for longer than a couple of years it is a hight risk for your project
- In terms of real world performance: Go is so close to Rust that there're very very very few use cases that really need that marginal gain
After a while I actually understood why Go is such a successful language / ecosystem:
Go's priority is to make projects easier. It is doing so by all it's smaller and larger features respectivly skipped features. But one soon understands the big picture of the Go team. Go is designed by very experienced devs who knew what is important and what not.
In my Go projects, I don't have to worry about:
- Memory safety
- Tooling
- Performance
- Structure (once I understood the package desgin philosophie)
- Difficult syntax
- Concurrency
- Libraries, as we can do most with the standard lib
- Maturenes and stability
Instead I focus on the things that count:
- Solve the problem at hand
- Create correct, stable and maintable software
And as this was not enough, the Go team comes around the corner with an 5 % average performace gift.
Awesome.