Comment by marcus_cemes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_cemes | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you for your explanation and fair comparison. I'm sure that a seasoned C/Go programmer would skirt around those difficulties or be using POSIX in the first place, I prefer languages that do not impose any constraints on your choice of OS, even if I do prefer Linux for development, but it's not good enough to replace my daily driver.

I don't think there will be a Rust implementation of sqlite3 in the near future, it would be a monumental task. Having the C bindings just work with static compilation in Rust was a deal-maker for that particular personal project, even if it's just because some crate maintainer went to the extra effort to make a robust cross-platform build script and nothing to do with the language itself, it shows that they put in some effort and pride, but I also get tired of the hype and the Rewrite in Rust catchphrase.

I'm a university student, as part of my student job I had to develop a backend application. Someone has to be able to pick it up after me, hence simplicity and easy of use. In the end, I chose Node.js after strongly considering Go, Rust and Elixir that have more cohesive tooling (formatter, linter, better module system!), it was the easiest to justify. I couldn't trust myself to not find any issues/complications with Rust or Go and I just can't afford them running into these issues and explaining to them "oh, you need to set up a C compiler toolchain on Windows".

> I'm sure that a seasoned C/Go programmer would skirt around those difficulties or be using POSIX in the first place, I prefer languages that do not impose any constraints on your choice of OS, even if I do prefer Linux for development, but it's not good enough to replace my daily driver.

It's not Go that imposed that restraint. It was the C API used for sqlite3 that did. There's nothing stopping you using C in Go on Windows without requiring msys2.

> I don't think there will be a Rust implementation of sqlite3 in the near future, it would be a monumental task.

You say that but there's already a pure Go version and Rust ecosystem is famed for rewriting C/C++ stuff. So I wouldn't be so sure.

> I'm a university student, as part of my student job I had to develop a backend application. Someone has to be able to pick it up after me, hence simplicity and easy of use. In the end, I chose Node.js after strongly considering Go, Rust and Elixir that have more cohesive tooling (formatter, linter, better module system!), it was the easiest to justify. I couldn't trust myself to not find any issues/complications with Rust or Go and I just can't afford them running into these issues and explaining to them "oh, you need to set up a C compiler toolchain on Windows".

Sounds like you made a really smart choice there. I'm impressed too because mature judgements like these are a skill even a great many senior engineers lack so to have that kind of foresight while you're still at university is impressive.

You certainly have to set one up for Rust. I'm not sure about Go. Unless I need speed I generally reach for python, but even it sometimes needs a C compiler. I'm surprised the Node.js never needs one? Usually these "higher level" languages end up (on large projects) ultimately calling out to c/c++ libraries of some sort that aren't included in the "native libraries". Is that not true for node.js ?

Yes, Rust guides you though setting up tge MSVC toolchain, then everything Just Works™, I'm not sure which toolchain the Rust sqlite3 bindings crate uses, but it also just works.

Actually, a lot of Node.js is written in plain JS, even large parts of the runtime itself, I've never needed a C compiler. This was mostly to make it easier for contributers that don't want to learn C++.

It's extremely rare for libraries to require any system dependencies, such as a C toolchain. Sharp (libvips bindings) will try to download precompiled binaries from a bucket somewhere, this is all done in ad hoc postinstall scripts, for better or for worse... Other libraries use JS as a C compile target with asm.js, opinions aside, it actually works pretty well.

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