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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Google had published a few papers stating that Rust code has fewer defects than similar complexity Go and Java services.

It's not just memory safety, but the design of the type system and error handling semantics that enable it to be smooth with exceptional behavior.

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Go's biggest flaw for backends is the error handling. No exceptions and nothing checking that you use the err.

Java's issue might be the lack of cooperative multitasking until recently (virtual threads). Best you could do was those promises frameworks that mangle your code, and Google in particular uses something a hundred times worse called Guice (which is also DI).

Java's biggest problem is the fact that mutability is so baked into the language. I'm working on a project now where I always need to dig deep to find out if something has been mutated or not. Yes, there are records and we are now getting into data oriented programming. But older codebases are really hard to read.

Java also has (In my experience) a higher concentration of inept developers who seem to have never heard of guard conditiona and early returns, and prefer instead to wrap everything in if conditions, pushing the actual logic into deeper nesting levels. Pyramids of doom all over.

Yeah but there are way more inept devs using JS, and I still have an easy time understanding JS codebases. Java seems to encourage overabstraction and weird frameworks.

One of the classic problems with OOP

One of the biggest mistake we've made as an industry. The good thing is that the worst days are over. The whole design pattern craze was pretty annoying, to say the least.

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