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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

In isolation Go is probably easier to write than Rust. However in terms of embedding/interop Rust is certainly much easier.

Last I looked there wasn't a way to pin a pointer in Go and they explicitly forbid passing around opaque handles so you're already constrained in how you can interop.

Secondly you now have a whole nother runtime to hoist up instead of a simple C FFI. It hit this just recently with Python+Rust. Needed to optimize an inner loop. I could just drop down to a single Rust fn, write it and be on my way. No need to spin up a whole runtime just for that inner function.

The parent also hit it on the head. If you're going to be writing C you already need to understand lifetimes deeply, Rust just codifies that in a way that lets you catch it at compile time.

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Certainly, those are exactly the reasons I would use to argue for Rust. I just don't like seeing people minimize its learning curve just to make a point.

> If you're going to be writing C you already need to understand lifetimes deeply,

Deeply? Unlike complicated languages like for example GC-languages, C only has 2 lifetimes: block scope for stack variables, forever (until explicitly free'd) for heap malloc'ed memory.

You don't have to twist your head to know in which of N possible ways the data you get from a function was allocated, you don't have to twist your head to know if you need to free it manually, or semi-manually, or hope that it gets freed automatically at some point.

You don't have to care about stack variables, you just have to be organised about heap variables, and that's it. No complicated concept, not many different paradigms. You malloc() something to get some memory when you need it, you free() it when you don't need it any more.

Also you don't have to twist your head to know if you can access some function argument, if it was passed by copy or by reference or by a third mean, does it involve heavy data copying or not, what does it mean concerning access, etc. Everything is passed by value (copy) and you can only pass simple objects (plus structures), for anything else you pass the value of the address of the object, end of story.

> C only has 2 lifetimes: block scope for stack variables, forever (until explicitly free'd) for heap malloc'ed memory.

To the contrary, C has just as many lifetimes as Rust. They're just not explicit. "free() it when you don't need it any more" is a complex problem and C doesn't really help you solve it at all.

> Everything is passed by value (copy) and you can only pass simple objects (plus structures), for anything else you pass the value of the address of the object, end of story.

That's how Rust works as well.

I don't think go is interpreted in the way python is

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