The type system may not always help you get your code out the door faster, but when you finally ship it, you have much easier time running it.
I have spent a lot of time in Rust getting carried away with type system stuff that is not required for the actual program I am writing. I realize this when I go over it a second time and reduce line counts drastically by replacing my gee-whiz generics with primitive types. This is balanced out by an equal number of times where I've reduced line counts drastically by using the advanced type stuff to reduce the repetition that comes along with using primitives to represent a type that has way more structure than the primitive.
I sometimes use the analogy of haiku versus short story.
You can pack a lot of meaning into a haiku, but few will be able to unpack it in the manner intended. A short story can get you to the point without filling a whole book to do so. And a lot more people can write a reasonable short story.
The question is, what is beyond generics? We need a humane alternative that still provides the type safe guard rails.
I do this too, but I’ve also come to realize that fresh perspectives and newly learned patterns may be more of the reason than being a little over zealous.
Edit: forgot to mention that this happens to me in most languages, not just rust.
In general I lean towards it not being a waste. That's not to say it's always useful for that project but it is usually useful as a learning exercise, that allows me to better identify similar patterns later (including whether generics are worth using compared to primitive types, in situations like that).
For example, I spent a good year or two forcing all of my iteration into functional styles. Now I am much better at coding in that style... and at knowing when a for loop is the more appropriate tool.
In C/C++, the base type system is so weak and squishy that everything redefines every type. You can no longer pass an 'int', but instead pass a "FOO_INT" or a "BARLONG" where FOO and BAR are trivial libraries that shouldn't need to redefine the concept of an integer.
Like C#, Rust has well-defined basic types, which eliminates a crazy amount of boilerplate and redefining the basics.
C# and Java might seem to have escaped that problem - but now it means that because `int` was defined back in 32-bit days programs can’t use `int` (System.Int32) when the intent is to use - what is presumably - “the best int-type for the platform” (I.e. C++’s fast-int types) - or the context (.NET’s arrays are indexed by Int32 instead of size_t, so you can’t have a Byte[] array larger than 2GB without some ugly hacks).
(I know this is moot for function locals as those will be word-aligned and so should behave the same as a native/fast int, but this isn’t guaranteed, especially when performing operations on non-local ints, such as in object instance fields).
Considering how seriously they take backward compatibility, the only way to do that would be to design a completely separate API, like they did with UWP. I'm 99.999% certain these macros are still being used somewhere out there. And who usually takes the blame when some badly written application stops working or compiling properly? Microsoft. (And I don't even like Microsoft.)
What I'm proposing isn't really a new API - but you're right about it having to be separate. It avoids the work of having to design a new API (and then implement it!) - what I'm proposing would keep the exact same Win32 binary API, but just clean-up all of the Win32 header files and remove as many #define macros and typedefs as possible - and redefining the headers for Win32's DLLs/LIBs using raw/primitive C types wherever possible.
There's just no need for "LPCWSTR" to exist anymore, for example. And I don't see anything wrong with calling the "real" function names (with the "W" suffix) instead of every call being a macro over A or W functions (which is silly as most of the A functions now cause errors when called).
This would only be of value for new applications written in C and C++ (which can directly consume Win32's header files) where the author wouldn't need to worry about missing macros. It would certainly make Win32 more self-describing again and reduce our dependence on the documentation.
Now we have Project Reunion as official confirmation of what has been slowly happening since Build 2018, as Microsoft pivoted into bringing UWP ideas into Win32.
Breaking backwards compatibility is a very high price to pay, as many of its proponents end up discovering the hard way.
I don't believe breaking back-compat was ever the problem: there were (and are) two main problems with UWP (and its predecessors[1]) going back to Windows 8:
* UWP were/are unnecessarily and very artificially restricted in what they could do: not just the sandboxing, but the app-store restrictions almost copied directly from Apple's own store.
* And because the then-new XAML-based "Jupiter" UI for UWP did not (and still doesn't, imo) ship with control library suitable for high-information-density, mouse-first UIs - and because XAML is still fundamentally unchanged since its original 2005 design with WPF in .NET Framework 3.5 - the XAML system is now far less capable (overall) than HTML+CSS in Electron now (the horror). Microsoft had a choice to maintain progress on XAML or let Electron overrun it for desktop application UIs - instead they've decided to keep XAML alive but for what gain? There simply isn't any decent exit-strategy for Microsoft now: they've just re-committed themselves to a dead-end UI system that needs significant amounts of re-work just to keep it competitive with Electron, while simultaneously using Electron for new headline first-party applications like Teams, Skype, Visual Studio Code, and more.
Microsoft has completely wasted the past ~10 years of progress they could have made on Windows and the desktop user-experience, letting Apple stay competitive with macOS while still funneling billions into iOS and iPad OS - further weakening the Windows value-proposition).
[1] Metro Apps, Modern Apps, Microsoft Store Apps, Windows Store Apps...
Skype uses React Native, and given that React Native for Windows bashes Electron in every talk that they give with its 300x overheard bar charts, expect that when React Native for macOS and Linux get mature enough, which MS is also contributing for, that eventually all Electron in use gets replaced with React Native.
Also React Native is built on top of UWP.
I can't speak for the iOS and Android mobile-apps, but the Skype software on my Windows 10 desktop is still an Electron app.
EDIT: This article from March 2002 says as much - Microsoft is moving away from React Native and sticking with Electron: https://www.windowscentral.com/latest-skype-preview-version-...
> Microsoft Skype is one of the largest React Native applications in the world.
https://blog.dashlane.com/exploring-react-native-on-windows/
With generics or typedefs (or a willingness to create lots of classes), you can be certain you never pass an Id<Foo> someplace that expects an Id<Bar>.
I write a lot of Rust nowadays, so I often need to keep myself in check and make sure I'm not getting sidetracked. When I'm writing internal code, the priority is to just get it done but still avoiding shortcuts. This is mainly avoiding .unwrap() / .clone() / taking care to handle Result correctly, as well as regularly running clippy to pick up the obviously silly stuff.
I find the most painful part of this strategy is when you want to revisit completed code to reduce copying as that generally requires a lot of type changes. At least when you get to this point though and haven't taken shortcuts, you've got functioning software and it should be fairly fault tolerant.
I spent 2 days implementing a (terrible) discriminated union struct type in C# (for types I don’t control, so I can’t just add an interface) rather than just return `Object` from a couple of methods.
Type systems need to be more expressive if we’re going to be able to increase developer productivity without costing program safety.
The .NET CLI itself places limits on what .NET-based languages can actually do: for example, structural-typing at method boundaries in CIL is only possible by having the compiler generate build-time adapter classes and interfaces - which means that methods accepting structural-types can’t be easily called by non-strucutural-typing-aware languages. The CLI also imposes single-inheritance - so a .NET language cannot implement multiple inheritance at all - and because non-virtual calls cannot be intercepted at all (without hacks like abusing .NET Remoting’s special-cases in the CLR) it’s not possible to have a “every call is virtual” system like Java’s in the CLR (note to self: find out how J# did it). Implementing Go-style composition is hamstrung by the fact we can’t patch the vtable at runtime either (reified vtables would be nice...).
I dare say it - but I think 2020 marks the decline of C# and the CLR because we’re held-back by decisions made over 15 years ago. .NET 5 isn’t showing any sign of significant improvements to the CLR’s type system or fundamental concepts.
A type system without native or at least low-impedance support for discriminated unions is, well, not a very good type system.
> Type systems need to be more expressive if we’re going to be able to increase developer productivity without costing program safety.
Lots of type systems support discriminated unions directly, or at least make it trivial to implement them. C# perhaps doesn’t, but that's a problem with C#, not typed programming in general.
This is interesting, because I generally feel like getting the types right actually IS most of the work that needs to be done, and once the types are correct the implementation code just follows from the available operations necessary. I've never used Rust, so perhaps it's different in this language (I understand memory management is quite onerous there?), but this is how things feel for me in C# or TypeScript.
My example for something that's simpler than Haskell but useful would be OCaml.
Most of my favourite design choices are the ones that make OCaml a functional programming language. So mostly not apt for Go. But here's a list of what I think one could adapt while staying true to the idea of a C-like language:
C had unions. They had some obvious problems. Go's solution was to get rid of them. OCaml instead went for discriminated unions (https://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/discriminated-unions/240009296) and made the compiler check that you are handling all cases correctly. In OCaml parlance, they are called algebraic data types.
C had null pointers. Go inherited them. OCaml uses the general mechanism of discriminated unions to represent cases like 'end of a linked list' or 'no data' or 'unknown' instead. And the compiler will check for you that you either handled those cases (when declared) or that you don't create those cases (when not explicitly declared to be there).
Some of C's constructs are generic. Like accessing arrays or taking the address of a value or dereferencing a pointer. To give an example, p works for a pointer of any type and does the right thing. And the compiler will tell you off, if you mix up the types.
As a user of C you can not add your own generic operations. You can use copy-and-paste or cast to and fro void or sometimes use function pointers in a clever way.
Go goes the same route. For example the built-in datastructures are generic, like maps or arrays.
Similar to C, a user of Go can not add their own generic operations. Go's sorting https://golang.org/pkg/sort/#Interface demonstrates what I mean by clever use of function pointers. (Note, how even that sorting interface still has lots of copy-and-paste when implementing and how it only really works for in-place sorting algorithms. I'm not sure how much trouble it would give in a multi threaded environment.)
I suspect Go's aversion to user-creatable generics comes from C++. C++'s templates confuse ad-hoc polymorphism and parametric polymorphism.
If C++'s unholy mess were the only game in town, Go's stance of restricting generics to the grownups (ie language implementors) would be perfectly reasonable.
OCaml carefully separates these two kinds of polymorphism.
Parametric polymorphism basically means 'this function or data structure works identically with any type'. That's what we also call generics. Eg the length of an array doesn't depend on what's in the array. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_polymorphism)
When compiling you only need to create code once regardless of type. (Modulo unboxed types.)
Examples of ad-hoc polymorphism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_polymorphism) are things like function overloading to do different things for different data types.
An infamous example are the bitshift operators from C whose cute looks got them roped into IO duty in C++.
In OCaml parametric polymorphism is handled as the simple concept it is. Ad hoc polymorphism (and unboxing for parametric polymorphism) are more complicated, and rightly make up the more complicated bits of OCaml types system.
Go could have gone with parametric polymorphism and left out ad-hoc polymorphism to stay simple.
(Parametric polymorphism synergises well with algebraic data types. Eg you can model the possibility of a null-pointer via an 'option' type, and have generic functionality to handle it. Same for the slightly richer concept of a value that's 'either an error message or a proper value'.)
But discussions about generics are a bit of a mine-field in Go.
Type inference. Go's type inference only goes one way, and is very limited. OCaml type inference goes backwards and forwards. Rust's system is perhaps a good compromise: it has similar machinery to OCaml, but they intentionally restrict it to only consider variable usage information from inside the same function.
(Generics restricted to parametric-polymorphism-only don't make type inference any harder.)
Back to something uncontroversial: Go allows tuples and pattern matching against them only when returning from functions and has lots of specialised machinery like 'multiple return types'.
OCaml just allows you tuples anywhere any other value could occur. You can pattern match against tuples and arbitrary other types. The compiler ensures that your pattern matching considers all cases.
I am sure there are more things to learn. But those few examples shall suffice for now. I feel especially strong about tuples as a wasted opportunity that wouldn't impact how the language feels at all. (From a practical point of view discriminated unions would probably make a bigger impact.)
- Written in Haskell
- Not a tool for manipulating Haskell
- With a substantial user base
- Other than Pandoc, xmonad, or shellcheck
Partial credit if you can name closed source software instead.
For Go, off the top of my head, Docker/K8s would qualify, but if we want to eliminate that, Hugo, Caddy, Gogs, etcd, fzf…
https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E1000+language%3AGo&ty...
https://github.com/search?l=&o=desc&q=stars%3A%3E1000+langua...
I think I've heard the name darcs, but have no idea what it is or does. I may have heard of postgrest but I think the whole category of a thin layer over the DB is dumb, so I refuse to learn about it. :-) (If you want to talk to your DB, use the native SQL drivers. Don't just invent the same thing but as REST or GraphQL for no reason. Backend system should connect SQL to SQL. If you want a browser to be able to talk to your DB, then you will need auth and want bundling of calls and object translation and suddenly the thin translation layer isn't thin anymore.)
Anyway, the point is that Haskell has been around for a long time and is very popular with HN/Reddit users, but unlike Go and Rust, it has produced a very small amount of OSS.
I tried using darcs for a bit. But the designers were a bit too ambitious: they had an elegant concept to solve all rebases automatically at least in principle. Alas, the early implementations sometimes ran into corner cases that had exponential runtime. Which in practice meant that it hang forever for all a user could tell.
As far as I can recall, that behaviour is fixed now. But they missed their window of opportunity, when other dvcs became really popular. Like git.
Interestingly, git had the opposite philosophy: they explicitly only resolve simple conflicts in a simple way, and bubble up anything slightly more complicated to the user.
About SQL: Haskell users wouldn't want to use SQL directly. They want their compiler to yell at them when they get their database interactions wrong.
So they don't want some much to have a layer on top of SQL that hides things, but they'd rather want some support to forbid nonsensical SQL queries.
Interestingly, at one of my previous jobs we had 'relational object mappers' in our Haskell code. What that means is that we used relations as data structures inside our Haskell code, but had to interact with a mostly object oriented world on the outside.
Relations make fabulous data structures for expressing business logic. Take the leap in expressivity coming from eg dumb C to Python's ad-hoc dicts and tuples, and then imagine making a similar step again, and you arrive at relations.
Especially the various kinds of joins are good at expressing many business concerns. But projections and maps etc as well. Basically, everything that makes SQL useful, but embedded in a better language and just as a datastructure.
Codd's paper on relational algebra (https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf) is just as relevant to in-memory programming as it is to data bases.
> Anyway, the point is that Haskell has been around for a long time and is very popular with HN/Reddit users, but unlike Go and Rust, it has produced a very small amount of OSS.
The ML family of languages that Haskell is a part of has been around for even longer, and many of the beloved features of Haskell stem from that older legacy.
I don't have high hopes of the ML family becoming more mainstream. But I am really glad to see many advances born in the land of functional programming, and ML or Haskell in particular, making it out into the wider world.
The poster child is garbage collection. Which was invented for Lisp in the first place.
(You can do functional programming without garbage collection, but it requires much more finesse and understanding than they had when Lisp was young. And even then, garbage collection is probably still the right trade-off when you programme is not resource constrained.)
Garbage collection is pretty much the default for new languages these days. People expect a good rationale for any deviation.
More recently we have seen first class functions, closures and lambdas make it out into the wider world. Even Java and C++ have picked up some of those.
First class functions belong relate to a wider theme of 'first class' elements of your programming language. I remember that eg in Perl you had to jump through extra hoops to make an array of arrays. That's because arrays were not by default treated the same as any other value.
I think Python did a lot for the mainstream here: Python is pretty good at letting you assign many of its constructs (like classes or functions or ints or tuples etc) to variables and pass them around just like any other value. In the understanding of the Python community, they see that just as good OOP, of course.
Combinators like map and filter have become popular in mainstream languages.
Algebraic data types have made it to a few languages. With that comes structural pattern matching, and the compiler complaining when you miss a case.
Tuples are pretty much expected in any new language these days.
The very article we are commenting on talks about generics.
Immutable data types are something every new language is supposed to have thought about. Even C++ has const and Java has final. Go's designers were asked to justify their very limited support for immutability.
Many people go so far as suggesting immutability should be the default in new languages. (And you could very well imagine a dialect of C++ where 'const' is implied, and you need 'mutable' everywhere, if you want to override that.)
There's quite a few more examples. Of course, correlation is not causation, and so not everything that showed up in functional programming languages before it showed up in the mainstream means that the mainstream actually got it from FP.
---
In summary, you are right that Haskell has not been used in OSS or commercial products as much as eg Go, but I am just happy that the rest of the world is moving in the Right Direction.
If anything, you should have asked about the prospects of OCaml, shouldn't you? (Spoiler alert: they are grimmer than Haskell's.)
Mostly, Go is full of wasted opportunities. It would have perhaps been a worthwhile language had they come up with Go instead of C in the 1970s. https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good is a good summary.
I would suggest having a look at D as an example of what an evolution of C could look. An evolution with fewer wasted opportunities.
We also used OCaml at Bloomberg quite a bit. (And they are still using it, but I'm not there anymore.)
But there's not that much more in the commercial OCaml world.
Haskell has actually a bit of a broader adoption. The open source library situation is also better.
(For the record, I like both OCaml and Haskell. And Janestreet are doing a great job.
And commercial and open source adoption are important. But they are not the end to every discussion.)
In my world, anything the type system doesn’t do for me, I must do myself in unit tests.
It’s actually possible to learn a type system and get good/fast at it. But typing out all those goddamn test cases never gets any easier, and updating them when the code changes is a nightmare.
When I was much younger, I was told by my elders that to a first approximation a function doesn't need a name because it's defined by its range and domain. If it's hard to discern what the function does just by the range and domain then your type system isn't powerful enough. This insight is as powerful as it is superficially wrong.
1) Consider easing functions in animation (see easings.net for examples). They all have domain and range "real numbers between 0 and 1", yet they are all meaningfully different.
2) Consider filters in audio processing. They all have domain and range "streams of real numbers", yet they are all meaningfully different. The fact that they have the same type is important - it allows composition of filters, which I'd hope would sound exciting to a typed programmer!
3) Consider sorting algorithms. Even under a very advanced type system, the domain would be "arrays of numbers" and the range would be "sorted arrays of numbers". Yet there are tons of sorting algorithms that are meaningfully different. The fact that they have the same type is important - it allows a sorting library to evolve without breaking applications.
See the common thread? Types enable mixing and matching functionality. If a type allows only one functionality, it's useless for that purpose.
I was thinking a similar thought: sine vs cosine. But I think that falls under 'superficially wrong'.
Can confirm, this happened to me in Java constantly. I once spent an hour writing a big utility class using generics, even though I needed it for only one type in the code. "What if I need it for something else? Copying the code and replacing the types is very inefficient!"
Turned out that Java, being Java, was unable to instantiate an empty array of a generic type, so the very elegant code in the utility class now meant having to handle a bunch of special null cases in the application. I actually left it in for a while, but thankfully changed my mind before merging it as I'm sure the team wouldn't have appreciated having to deal with even more null in unexpected places because I got attached to my shiny generic code.
In general, I agree with your sentiment. Though in some cases, an abstraction can be justified even when used only once.
Take the simple case of a function. Generally a function only communication with its surroundings via parameters and returned values. A function that respects those conventions makes reading code much easier, and can be worth it even if used only once.
In contrast, a code block inside a much larger stretch of code doesn't give the reader any explicit guidance one how it intends to interact with the rest of the system. Even if it's exactly the same code as in the function.
Similarly, a for-loop can do almost anything. But using map or filter immediately tells you that only a few things are possible here. Even a fold is more restricted than a general for-loop.
'Theorems for free' makes a very similar argument for generics. https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dreyer/tor/papers/wadler.pdf
This is especially true with Rust where you also need to consider who owns what data. With C# it’s much too to model things that make sense as a type zoo but where the more important problems like ownership and access patterns is lost in the cracks.
The typical sign in Rust is when you need a lifetime on a struct so you realize it has someone else’s data. That usually means I stop to think before progressing. In C# it’s very easy to miss that big red flag.
Obviously it’s always worth revisiting and simplifying a design, but I still don’t think the initial design or designs were a waste of time if it gave me an understanding of the problem space.
In Go I never felt that omg it misses some big features we're screwed, we're going to pay the cost of running that in Prod. All the services I worked on while not being perfect ran like a clock without issues on the long term, and it has to do with Go "simplicity", eventhough you never wrote the code you can actually jump into any code base without issues, there is no weird abstraction layer / complexity that takes you day to understand.
For me the fact that Go is a "simple" language is very powerful because on the long run it's much easier to maintain.
I like Rust a lot and I hope to get to use it more, but "added type safety at the expense of iteration velocity" is not a good tradeoff for my domain and I suspect many others (although its iteration velocity is improving monotonically!).
Rust: For code that isn't meant to be iterated upon, that must be safe/correct while also being performant.
Go: For code that is meant to be iterated upon frequently, that must be performant and easy to maintain.
I would like my tools to be written in Rust, and I would like to interface with them in Go.
But the same shoddy system is also constantly changing the requirements, precisely because nothing is built for posterity and there's tons of make-work churn. Good type systems make code far easier to refactor, and refactoring (as opposed to slapped-on new code) is the only way to handle shifting requirements without being crushed under ones own weight.
I'm not confident that average level developers are able to ship features in Rust as quickly as they would in Go, which is the root of my point. Those building tools, which generally do not have the same success metrics with respect to speed and correctness, should use the language with a focus on safety and correctness. Those whose positions do not lend themselves to safety and correctness should not use that tool.
Even if this was a genuine concern, they should still use Rust. Because it will be far easier to refactor the code that they ship into something that is safe and correct, compared to rewriting a Go codebase.
I don't write much Go code, but my company does. I have seen so many incidents and bugs whose root cause was: someone changed a library, that broke the semantics that users were relying on, but everything still compiled fine, so nobody noticed the subtly wrong behavior for a long time. An incredible amount of money has been lost like this.
Go simply does not give you the tools to prevent these issues in the type system, you have to rely on really thorough unit tests (which inevitably don't get written in the spirit of "moving fast".)
Whenever I hear about Rust in companies same dozen or so companies get mentioned every time.
But in general, companies adopt Go for the same reason they adopt MongoDB [0]: it's really easy to get started with, and get something that "works." The pain comes months or years down the road, and by then you're stuck with it.
[0] A company I previously worked for starting using MongoDB as a small startup, starting finding the limitations about 6 months later, but ending up spending an incredible amount of engineering time over 5 years getting rid of it.
We get it. You don't like Go. Don't use it. That's a perfectly fine option. Plenty of very successful companies, open source projects and services all work with Go (and literally every language) without issue. You not liking something does not make it bad.
As another example, Go makes it impossible to create a Maybe/Option type which leads to a bunch of issues around returning failing or empty values from functions. In one particularly costly example, there was a function in a library that was getting some price information from a file. Originally this returned nil when the price information could not be loaded, but a refactoring caused it instead to return 0 which the client happily used. This was not caught for _weeks_.
You can write unsafe code in Rust. Does that mean that Rust is bad too?
Hard to feel sympathetic, as this practice violates the Go convention of adding an additional return value to the function to indicate failure, either of type error or bool, as appropriate.
>Go makes it impossible to create a Maybe/Option type
It's very much possible: https://play.golang.org/p/MCxGcZ-rJRU.
Of course, it's not generic, but I have a feeling that might change soon :)
Go constantly requires boiler-plate checks for errors, null values etc. without the type checker helping ensure you've checked for an error or null value.
As for the second example I don't think it's a language issue but more a programmer one, how Rust would have saved you in that case, anyone could have returned 0 for the price instead of a proper type. Using Rust doesn't magically turn programmer into good ones. You still have to know how to properly design your code and best use the language and its features.
I'm often reading code in various language and I'm baffled at what a giant lib.rs looks like from someone that never really used Rust.
They wanted to do: something(getPrice()), but if getPrice can actually fail the then either something needs to accept an error, or they need to handle the error.
No type system imagined can save you from someone who's decided returning 0 is the correct way indicate an error in this scenario.
You've missed the problem that was posed. It wasn't returning 0 to indicate an error, it was changing the error value from nil to 0. In rust that would've been a type change (from Option<int> to int). Because the context here was about how stronger type systems (like rust's) allow you to be more specific about your types, and thus many code changes that would not involve the type changing in other more weakly-type languages do cause a type change in rust.
return 0, errors.New("unable to get price")
Go has its problems, and it isn't a perfect language, but I have never felt unproductive using it. In fact, my company uses it for all backend services. It has a great stdlib and first class tooling. Most of the discussion in this thread seems to be coming from people who barely use it or have only dabbled with go.
As a tangent, it's really tiring to see HN engage ad nauseum in these pointless language debates. Every language has its place; use it when it's appropriate.
The package ecosystem was so stable that go didn’t ship with a package manager (not saying it’s good but definitely a sign of relative stability).
Besides nil pointers (typesystem could do better here) and bad logic (can’t do better but language simplicity reduces this), what you’re saying is definitely not the experience of the majority. People constantly talk about being able to go to a golang program from 8 years ago and run it with no problems. Rust changes every few weeks.
You stated that "Rust is merging random syntaxes and random packages get upgraded to std lib all the time" as though it were incompatible with "being able to go to a program from 8 years ago and run it with no problems". But there's no incompatibility here. Rust adds new features at a faster rate than Go does, but it also maintains backwards compatibility ("stability without stagnation").
Sure the mainline stays clean but thats not what matters in practice.
Which also explains why you can git clone a Go library/tool and have it not building because some dependencies introduced some breaking changes in the master branch. That happened the last 3 times I wanted to fix something in a Go project.
I really don't know where this is coming from. The only package that was included into std like this is replacing the hashmap with hashbrown, and this didn't even change the public api of the standard library at all, besides improving performance of the hashmap.
In all likelihood, that "incredible amount" is a small fraction of the money your company saved in iteration velocity by not using Rust in the first place. This might not be true depending on your domain--if you're writing space shuttle software, bugs can be really expensive. If you're writing ordinary web app backend code, you're probably much better off with Go than Rust.
Not that Java is even good, but that beats go. The history of Go is the history of Java, repeated as farce. It's even some of the same academic lineage come to bail things out with the type system for generics!
Go is a dramatically nicer programming experience than Java. There are some benefits in Java however: sometimes JIT is nice and Go has no analog to Spring. But these are very circumstantial benefits and not good tradeoffs in the general case.
>No need to learn groovy to configure Gradle to build your application
I rarely have to configure msbuild, mostly to do some relatively advanced stuff like auto-installing npm dependencies for an SPA.
>No need to learn javadoc
Just use
/** */
You can build pseudo-statically linked executables by adding one line to .csproj (which builds a single executable file, but it's really a self-extracting archive), and real static linking is in the works. I have no need for it personally though.
>how to compile your code ahead of time
Same thing — AOT compilation is one configuration line away. You don't need it very much though, as the CLR is very performant these days and beats Go in most benchmarks:
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
>No need to figure out how to tune your GC for low latency and low memory usage
I would argue CLR's GC is ahead of Go's GC at least for latency. Memory usage, not so much, but damn, look at the execution times above. It depends on your priorities I guess.
>Plus Go has value types
C# has had them since before Go was a thing. Unlike Java, it also has real structs, which you can configure the alignment of, and map a raw chunk of memory to them (which you received from a COM port, for example). This came in handy more often than I care to remember.
As for your forest/banana analogy, I'd argue it's never been as bad in .NET world as it's been in Java world. I have personally never found anything similar to the insane class hierarchies they have in Spring.
Try to do something with stuff like XAML Workflows, Bizztalk, WCF, SharePoint, or MVVM. :)
Btw, did you know the default Gradle configuration for compiling a Java app is literally 1 line?
apply plugin: 'java'
Wrt gradle: While it’s super easy to get started, any slight modification is a major pain.
Note to other tooling guys for other languages:
- I don’t want to write in a new language just for my build system
- I don’t want freaking xml hell like maven
And don’t get me even started with Maven as a package manager. But to be honest... it’s at least better than NPM :-)
In general the concept of a "cross platform" build tool and "not having to learn another language" are at odds with each other, for anybody who isn't lucky enough to already work in the language the build tool is written in.
Those are the stapled languages in the backend space which Go competes in. You could give some of them a try.
I can easily see it being tedious if you have to type every character.
Code navigation is extremely basic (can only find references in the same package!), often breaks, and can't handle stuff like finding all interfaces that a type implements, or finding all implementations of an interface.
Then, I tried VSCode with the Go plugin, both the default version and the go pls based one; and Emacs with the LSP package and go pls.
Really good IDE support would include refactoring (more than renaming a local variable/struct field, e.g. Extract Function, extract parameter), advanced navigation/analysis (analyze data flow to/from variable, find call stack etc).
Go is somewhat decent in the tooling area, and you can get your job done with it, but it really doesn't have anything I would call good support in any area of tooling except the compiler (not code analysis, not debugging, not monitoring, not profiling, not package management).
I suppose it depends on what you're used to. I've never found myself wanting to do these things, but I'm also strictly from a Python and C++ background so my standards are admittedly lower than Java and C# people. Hopefully gopls solves for these problems.
2. There's lots of software that "ships" as a web service, often used by people who are not paying for the web service.
If you're talking about defects for an actual product that render it unsafe or unsuitable for the intended purpose, then I can see your point (though even there I'm not sure that I completely agree). But there's much more software than that.
As soon as I need to use someone else's code, all bets are off. Half the reason I want types is because it makes my life easier when I'm trying to use something written by someone else -- instead I find myself needing to experiment with a debugger to figure out what functions are actually doing.
Taking this gradual typing tool a step further, you can run your tests with the typeguard plugin for pytest, which will dynamically check the types of most values, pointing out places where your types are a lie.
https://typeguard.readthedocs.io/en/latest/userguide.html#us...
In my view, type checking lulls one into thinking the code is better than it actually is, just because it compiles. But it doesn't test the algorithms. And testing the algorithms exercises the code enough to reveal the shallow type errors.
But yes, there's a lull with type checking that makes people believe only negative testing is sufficient, which is as foolish as thinking only positive testing is sufficient.
What you point out is a developer error. Mixing variable types in a dynamically typed language is, like generics, a code smell.
Using a dynamically typed language is all about not having to babysit the compiler, its not about playing dumb about types.
If you design your functions in a way that that function will never receive an array, you dont have to test for it. And if some idiot tries one day, it should error very loudly that something is wrong.
Too many abuse dynamic typing to the point they feel safer offloading this headwork to a compiler.
That is, they get the compiler to make sure nobody will ever send an array into that function that takes a string.
All generics do is bring back the lack of typesafety and all the manual typechecking that comes with muddying generalizing the parameter typeset.
I actually dont hate generics, they are super powerful, but I question every usage as suspicious.
I also wish people would remember human brains arent all the same. We have different ways of thinking about problems. Some people need to have a compiler to busy work, some people need to do busy work while they think.
I just wish people shitting on dynamic typed languages would remember they came to solve the mess and monotomy that arose from typesafety.
Someone mentioned they felt go was going backwards from rust, i think both languages are massive steps backward from python.
Then you've moved it from a test to a runtime assertion. You're still re-implementing the type-checker, poorly.
A compile time error is a caught error. A run time error may be, or perhaps not.
A statically typed language with compile-time type checking would flag that immediately, and chances are your IDE will show the error before it even gets to that point.
Type hints are a thing, but then you are already moving in that direction while remaining in python.
A certain amount of it is probably a familiarity thing, but I do usually find myself able to parse it to the point of what line in which file things started to go wrong.
Besides that, i only said it was a code smell, i dont debate that its useful sometimes. Just that its a signal to be careful, check you really need itor there is t some other constraint you can break.
My only advice is that narrowing your parameter types at the earliest opportunity is a good practice and results in much easier to understand code.
But perhaps not enough.
"Convenience constructors" (i.e., static methods for creating instances from a set of parameters) are fine, but should often not be in the same module (or perhaps even the same package) as the class anyway. For example, if you have a Book class and it has a convenience constructor for creating a book from a database connection string and a book ID, this is probably reasonable for certain applications, but if it's likely that others would want to use your book class in non-database applications, then it would be a travesty to make the non-database application take a dependency on sqlalchemy, a database driver, etc (especially since database drivers tend to be C-extensions which may or may not be difficult to install on various target platforms).
I can assure you I do beleive they have their purpose and place in the world where raw performance or closer to metal abstractions can take place.
Personally, my brain much prefers to use a dynamic type system to infer what i mean leaving the thinking part up to me.
I just find defining a string is a string when im only ever going to put a string in there kind of redundant.
There are other arguments about readability, refactorability, and similar and I think they have some weight in large doverse systems with many many teams interacting.
Personally, that isnt a large issue for me. Im working at the scope I can maintain a standard and a level of consitency that alleviates these problems to the point the type safety is simply not wareanted from a return on investment point of view.
I do not, for instance, think the kernel or chrome should be rewritten in javascript. Despite what some react developers seem to think.
There are 2 problems with this kind of thinking.
1) you aren't going to be so sure. Humans are imperfect and as codebase grows, everyone commits such errors. Eg comparing a string to int without converting it to int in python. It always returns false (IIRC) and it is hard to detect where the problem is.
2) Most type systems aren't that verbose. I guess you got the impression from java / mediaeval C++. But most statically typed languages have local variable type inference. OCaml / Haskell / F# / Swift etc.. have varying degrees of type inference. At this point, types in method signatures, in languages that require it, serve as documentation. And many of these languages are terser than python/javascript.
1) I work on a typescript codebase for work. There is a real need for types in this case because the definitions are about 3 layers of abstraction away from their use. It drives me up the wall because I know when you keep definitions close to use, or have some basic conventions this problem melts away. At least to the point of diminishing returns where types are no longer relevant.
So, i guess over the years ive been caught out by int + string = 0 all of like, 1-2 times in production, maybe a few more while in dev. Either way its rare enough for me to call FUD on the argument. Stop mixing types and this really doesnt happen. To be fair to your point, at work, i know of a recurring error in production where this is almost certainly the same class of error. Nobody can be bothered fixing it because its too hard to track down and the cost benefit isnt there.
2) Type inference is problematic for me. Doesnt it just open you up to type errors of a different class?
2.5) terse code is not the point, I find rust cryptic and dense to say the least. I prefer something like go wgere readability is a priority over density.
It's at compile time, so not really? It will tell you exactly what it expects vs what you provided at compile time. These kind of languages read like dynamic languages (for the most part) but they are completely static.
I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding you here, but generics are type safe. They're statically checked at compile-time.
That's naïve. Unless you code extra defensively (which is the same type of overhead as excessive testing, and needs itself to be verified by testing), there's very little guarantee that type errors will result in loud failure consistently at the first point that the bad value is passed (because functions that don't do unnecessary work often pass their arguments along without doing a lot of work dependent on the very specific type.)
And, in any case, failing consistently at compile time (or, with a modern code editor, at writing time) with static type checking is better than failing at runtime, even if it is loud and consistent.
Of course things like mypy and TypeScript (especially, in the latter case, because it powers tools that work pretty well when the actual immediate source is plain JS, or JS with JSDoc comments from which type information can be extracted, when consuming libraries with TS typings) mean that some popular dynamic languages have static type checking available with more expressive type systems than a number of popular statically-typed languages.
def foo(arg: str) -> int
def foo(arg: List[Union[Set[int],Optional[Dict[str, Any]]]]) -> str
Also, IIRC, better type inference.
It takes a while for something to settle down enough to say this version is going to be the code for the long run.
At that point, solidity in testing and gradual typing can be added, usually starting with the public interface.
Languages where I’ve had to satisfy all type errors in the various fragments of half brained code I’ve written for version 0.0.85 have always felt a little cumbersome. The compiler’s type checker is a perfectionist looking over my shoulder.
(Go is one of those languages. Ruby is not.)
Refactoring any dynamically typed application (regardless of size) is a manual operation, and error prone.
But then again I rarely deal with type errors, when I do it's the compiler looking out for my often 'application ending' mistakes.
Go, the language, is simple. Hard to argue with, and sounds great.
The code I have to write though, it's quite simpler to do it in Python more often than not.
What is missing is a language with good static type system (Algebraic data types, stream/iterators, generics), simple and having GC, for application domains where prototyping speed matters.
F#, OCaml and Haskell (and other ML-family languages) satisfy the first 3 criteria (type system, simple and GC) and depending on your familiarity with the language, can be fairly suitable for fast prototyping.
For example, I write most of my new personal projects in Haskell, and I'm able to iterate pretty rapidly once I have a skeleton of the system in place (with liberal use of typed holes to ignore things I don't care about implementing right now). For some projects, I find I'm actually able to prototype more rapidly than I would be able to in an untyped language, because the language helps me express the shape of the data through algebraic data types, and then the functions end up having "one obvious implementation" that follows the structure of the data.
OCaml is actually very good language. I hate how people outright dismiss it mentioning multicore. Neither JS nor Python have great multicore story. And most applications don't need multicore.
Wish there was a good static compilation toolchain for .net core. F# would gain much more traction then.
Mypy for Python (https://mypy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) and Flow for Javascript (https://flow.org/en/docs/) are my personal favorites, and have all the features you describe. And importantly, both languages have very strong library support.