Re: [dev] Let's talk about Go, baby

From: Richard Wiedenhöft <richard_AT_wiedenhoeft.xyz>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2019 10:32:23 +0100

On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 11:45:39AM -0800, Anselm Garbe wrote:
> The language itself is certainly better than C++ or Java and avoided
> many mistakes (like exceptions and going to far with OO). On the other
> hand the typesystem isn't great and much more complex than golang's
> approach. Also I dislike the distinction of raw pointers (unsafe) and
> various types of references.
>
> Besides this it's the hipster environment of Rust that is putting me
> off. In contrast - even if golang suffers the same to some degree and
> is heavily sponsored by Google, the main ideas that resulted into Go
> are clearly footprints of Bell Labs. In Rust I do miss this influence
> -- there seems more influence in Rust from the 'functional'
> programming folks - which have also worsened Java dramatically since
> the Java 6 days (lambdas, weird container/collection programming
> paradigms etc.).
>
> When looking at Rusts' experiemtal features such as future, intrinsics
> etc. I have the feeling that adopting it might lead to a big regret in
> the mid term, which is why I would stay away ;)
>
> Best regards,
> Anselm

I am very interested in why you dislike functional-programming paradigms. It's
a lot of complexity for sure but IMHO it makes it easier to reason about
certain complicated problems. There are cases where it's worth the extra
(well-defined) complexity.

Regarding Rust: I actually think that Rust's memory/thread safety features solve
a lot of problems. In particular most serious security issues in the recent past
wouldn't have happened if Rust was used. That makes the language at least
interesting and I'd be careful to dismiss it right away. Also the cargo
environment is entirely optional.

~Richard
Received on Sun Jan 27 2019 - 10:32:23 CET