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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

> Currently Rust is about Go's age but nowhere close in usage.

Citation? I see a lot of people talking about both, but not very many public projects in either. Rust at least has a "killer app" on the way in the form of Servo, whereas I haven't heard of any user-facing programs in Go.

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FWIW, Go and Rust are 16 and 43, respectively on the TIOBE index:

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

A Github search turned up 2,658 Go repositories with more than 100 stars:

https://github.com/search?l=go&q=stars%3A%3E100&type=Reposit...

compared to 348 Rust repositories:

https://github.com/search?l=rust&q=stars%3A%3E100&type=Repos...

Notably, Docker has more stars than Go itself.

Edit: you may also be interested in IEEE Spectrum's interactive list of the top programming languages:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/interactive-the-top-programm...

With the default parameters, Go and Rust are 10 and 26, respectively.

It's also worth noting that you're a bit less likely to see rust users because the kind of software that wants rust instead of golang tends to be the kind that gets written by a large company with deep pockets and a preference for closed source repositories.

If only Go was useful in building closed source products. Google must not have gotten the memo about Rust yet.

Contrary to popular legend, Google is not particularly strong on Go use, and it's not "THE official language".

It wasn't officially commissioned or officially adopted by Google to solve Google's coding problems as some believe.

It was merely initiated by a small team in Google, as their proposal for solving Google-scale coding problems. And has never been mandatory for new Google projects etc.

Go is ONE of the allowed languages, from what I know, but tons of stuff is written in Java, C++ and Python with no intentions of switching.

All those years, only a few, and basically trivial with respect to Google's needs, use examples for Go have come out of Google-land (a proxy/balancer for MySQL used in YouTube, Google Downloads caching, etc).

Some googler claimed that Go currently has single-digit MLOC in Go, and that it's growing. But they have way more C++ and Java code.

Why would they switch a perfectly working software code with something in Go? Java is 15 year older than Go so obviously lot more code would be in it. More interesting case is Dart as despite having 'official' Google support, industry wide usage is rather tepid compared to Go.

Go: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/GoUsers

Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html

Without counting Go usage roughly looks 10 times more than Rust.

Docker and Kubernetes are relatively popular, and both are written in Go.

Go is the language in the LXC, Docker, containerisation space.

Which is something I never understood. Since you are mainly wrapping OS API, why not take a higher level langage ?

For all the benefits of higher-level languages. Remember that the designers of C had to agree on every feature that went into Go: a language they co-designed for better programming experience & results. Wirth-style languages also compile ultra-fast for quick iterations.

My question is really why not choose something really higher level ? Go is like stuck in the middle. If I need very low level, I'd choose rust. If I need high level, I'd choose Python. Go is kinda filling a weird niche between the two and I rarely find a case where I feel like it's the best choice.

What language you have in mind?

Anything that is robust, dynamic, with a big ecosystem. Python, Ruby, whatever have you. You don't need raw speed since the OS API does most of the work, and the ease of programming would make it more productive. In the end, they added Python anyway for stuff like "compose", so I'm missing the point of using Go for this. The Go code is not even network bound, the ability to get multicore easily is not a bit advantage here since you spawn a new process anyway, so really, why ?

Go has much lower memory usage, high throughput, std ssl/tls/http libraries, high performance GC and produce fully static binaries. I do not think Python/Ruby can provide required performance for containers, cluster scheduling, orchestration etc. Even Java with much higher perf compared to Python/Ruby is not suitable because of high memory usage.

> lower memory usage, high throughput [...] high performance GC

Irrelevant, as most ressources will be consummed from underlying OS API.

> std ssl/tls/http libraries

So does Python and Ruby. But even if it didn't, you provide a package anyway.

> produce fully static binaries

You can do that with Python and nuikta. But there is need for it, since docker is provided as an msi/deb/whatever that take care of distribution.

> high memory usage.

On your xGb RAM server, the memory usage of your container is the least of your problem. Your DB will dwarf it, your app will dwarf it. Anything you put in your containers will take 100 times more memory.

OCaml is my first thought in that space.

Ocaml is a good choice, and Anil Madhavapeddy used it for his unikernel ideas. But Ocaml doesn't have strong backing any more. JaneStreet alone isn't enough.

InfluxDB and Prometheus are written in Go. Similarly, etcd.

Docker is go, and afaik has always been.

https://github.com/docker/docker

Rust code is also going into Firefox, slowly for now, but it will speed up over 2017.

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