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Comment by zelly | Hacker News Reader

The push for Rust is coming from above, top-down. Watch what programmers do, not say. They prefer Go to Rust because it compiles fast.

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That depends on the programmer. Personally, I will choose rust ovet go almost every time, because I think it has a better type system, and is in many (but not all) ways more ergonomic. And that is more important to me than compile time, although I concede that other programmers (especially those with more experience with interpreted languages) prioritize compile time I over other language aspects. Besides which, my experience has been that when incrementally compiling during development, go compilation isn't actually that much faster.

Every language that goes all-in on type safety (Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala) ends up being too hard to actually use in day-to-day programming. But people publicly say that they prefer it so as to not signal that they themselves find it too difficult. In an ideal world, I'd be writing everything in Coq, but I still live on earth and have deadlines, so I'll "do that some other day". All the code ends up being in some practical language, but when I get a developer survey I'll say I love the type safe hippie language.

I think the difficulty with those languagrs comes more from the pure functional paradigm than type safety. And I do use scala as a day-to-day language. Also, I'm not saying I prefer rust over go after reading some documentation and playing around with toy examples. I've written real code in both, and prefer the rust experience. I think go's main advantage is it is easy to learn. That is a real advantage in some cases (like onboarding new employees/contributors), but for me and many programmers I know it is not a sufficiently compelling reason to give up a more powerful type system.

Exactly this! I use Go because it's easy when I sometimes need to provide small binaries to colleagues to help with their day-to-day work. And those are colleagues who don't have a Python environment installed or anything, which I'd be opting for in small "workflow improvement" cases like this. So whip up a small Go program, compile to Windows, and make a colleague happy. But when I build larger codebases with my developer colleagues (or private projects at home) I really prefer Rust as it gives me so much more trust in the code that I might have to maintain for years and where the linecount is not just <200, but actually thousands and thousands.

> Every language that goes all-in on type safety (Haskell, OCaml, F#, Scala) ends up being too hard to actually use in day-to-day programming.

F# is the most pleasant, practical day-to-day programming language that I have personally used. Scala is also quite nice.

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