Eventually I think it'll be seen as the next PHP. A language that people love to hate.
But the result is that today, the ecosystem is huge. Implementing a kubectl plugin in Go is far easier than in other languages. Many things are in fact simpler with Go thanks to its vast stdlib and ecosystem.
I hate it, and yet... It's still useful to me.
At work we have a split code base between rust and go, using go to interface with the world due to better ecosystem while using rust for the heavy lifting of business logic in an extremely concurrent implementation.
Even though the rust side is more complex it is much easier to work with and refactor leading to fewer bugs. The language simply gives so much for free, when you get over the first humps of a slow start.
The Rust cycle of 1. make it work, 2. handle errors, 3. encode invariants in the type system to prevent inadvertent refactors is simply magical.
> The language simply gives so much for free
> The Rust cycle of 1. make it work, 2. handle errors, 3. encode invariants in the type system to prevent inadvertent refactors is simply magical.
My view of "free" in the comment is correctness. Concurrent code simply keeps on working through refactors to suit the business needs. Most of the time the tests pass the first time the code compiles again after a refactor of core pieces. That is something I haven't experienced in any other language. I simply do not feel scared touching, changing or removing anything to get the most lean code base possible.
Compare this to Python where I want to have the mental model of the entire "world" for every change I do and then simply hope that the tests will catch any errors. Go is better when kept simple, but still a lot of implicitness and conventions leading to easy shooting yourself in the foot.
> Isn't that the workflow of any minimum viable product development paradigm?
Definitely, Rust simply gives more tools for it. For example through sum types and traits to enforce invariants. Say comparing to the awful iota hacks to get "enums" in Go, accidentally having a meaningful default value or run time verification because somewhere you ended up with an interface{}.
In rust for the "make it work stage" simply throw expects everywhere and choose to panic on errors, or just bubble to the top without caring. It never silently simply works unless you've explicitly chosen how to deal with the possibilities which is very reassuring.
Go has some of that feel, but actually doing something useful with errors more than logging I have never seen a good paradigm for yet. Errors as/is kind of works but still puts most of the work on the user to figure out the correct thing. Maybe I haven't dove deep enough though.
For some info on how far you can take error handling in Rust forcing correctness on the users see this blog post from Sled (an embedded KV database) http://sled.rs/errors.html
Interestingly, the example code on the Tokio github page use the antipattern described in the Sled article, regarding the try operator.
Yes, true. But so is Erlang/Elixir.
An error should be taken care of immediately, or propagated with some additional context. Returning the error instead of throw/catch makes this explicit and forces the developer to think about it.
In practice: a lot of boilerplate code.
Rust does this better with the Result type and the ? operator.
Maybe this is a key ingredient in successful languages. Just warty and anachronistic enough that users learn a lot of unique patterns that keep them glued to the language.