Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

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> It's not a problem with Go, per se, but it does create non-trivial requirements toolchain setup on Windows, which ruled out Go for me. The whole toolchain just feels a bit... flakey, setting up GOPATH and such (although, that seems to no longer be the case?). Rust's crates, just as an example, are amazing, I've never had a single problem with them (more than I can say for npm..) I know it's just one example, but sqlite3 is brilliant. This immediately ruled out Go for me for that project.

GOPATH is gone, thankfully, and with the introduction of modules. As with many things, crappy tutorials littered around the internet make things difficult. The toolchain itself is pretty damn easy to set up, it "just works" unless you want to use cgo (or one of your modules does), and in that case you're just left hanging. It's pretty clear that go despite _running_ cross platform doesn't particularly care about windows, e.g. the path package basically doesn't support windows natively, the cgo mess, etc.

> Rust's crates, just as an example, are amazing,

Rust has it's own set of problems that you're glossing over here. As an example, many popular crates required nightly last time I looked. Rust's compile times are incredibly painful too, and one of the worst offenders is the #1 json library for rust (serde).

The only popular crate that I can think of that still requires nigthly is Rocket[0], the 0.5 release does not but the lack of maintenance means that it has been three years since 0.4 and months since the last update. In that time Warp, Axum, Tide, Actix and many more frameworks that are all on stable has eaten its lunch. As for long compile times, I agree, it has gotten heaps better but is still far from Go (nor will it ever get that good), but for most my projects with incremental debug builds its in the ballpark of ~2 seconds, which is good enough for me and `cargo check` is close to instant. Release builds, yeah, they are slow.

[0]: https://github.com/SergioBenitez/Rocket

> Rust's compile times are incredibly painful too, and one of the worst offenders is the #1 json library for rust (serde).

Go and Rust sort of took opposite paths in terms of the compiler.

Rust spends the compilation time (for release compiles) to generate the fastest binaries the compiler can emit. The article talks about Go adding things like "A recent improvement was in version 1.17, which passes function arguments and results in registers" that's stuff that compilers like llvm have been doing pretty much at inception (20 years).

Go has optimized for compilation speed with the understanding that "Well, it's probably not CPU time that is REALLY making your software slow".

Go compiles faster and rust compiles faster results.

This is why I think Go could benefit with an LLVM target.

They are painful... Running the executable at the end with such a tiny footprint and outstanding predictable performance is very gratifying, however. It feels like the language and the compiler love you, they just have to work a little harder to deal with the complexity of macros and generics!

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