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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

Reading the Go spec will only take an hour or two if you don't get distracted. If wasting time is your concern, it's such a small amount that you've probably recently wasted more time on a number of trivial things. Reading the Rust Book takes a bit longer, but it's still just a handful of hours.

https://go.dev/ref/spec https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

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> Reading the Rust Book takes a bit longer, but it's still just a handful of hours.

Speaking as someone who is really enjoying learning Rust, time taken to read the book isn't a good metric for understanding the language.

The book is just a first step. The really important thing is "how much work do I have to do to get a decent level of foundational knowledge about the language", which is relatively little for either Go or Rust (or most other languages).

> The really important thing is "how much work do I have to do to get a decent level of foundational knowledge about the language", which is relatively little for either Go or Rust (or most other languages).

I might have agreed with this before I tried using Rust's strings, borrow checker and lifetimes in anger. I had some real speed bumps with these even given my prior knowledge of C#, Common Lisp and C.

I agree that Go is a much smaller language and it can be learned more quickly. But I'm not sure if reading the spec is the right approach here. Shouldn't OP rather learn from a tutorial? The spec will explain the "how" part of the language but probably not the "why" part.

https://go.dev/learn/

The spec is very easy to read, and followed with some code examples can have you up to speed very quickly. Better to just spend the time up-front when it's cheap and then get the practice actually using the knowledge.

I'm not terribly familiar with Go, but surely the comparison here must be with Rusts Reference[0]? It is a bit shorter than the Rust Book (a simple print-to-pdf says 435 pages vs. 664 pages, and 104 pages for the Go spec).

0: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference

I think the Go reference was designed with learning users in mind, whereas the Rust one isn't. That's where the book comes in; it's a more structured way to learn the language than just reading the reference. The reference can be supplementary, thought.

Thanks for sharing! That’s good to know. I’ll likely knock out the go spec in that case. Lmk if you have any opinions either way

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