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Comment by bieganski | Hacker News Reader

i wish there was an additional column in the table, that says "what problem does it solve". oh, and 'it's written in rust' does not count.

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“It’s written in Rust”

Actual LOL. Indeed. I was working for a large corporation at one point and a development team was explaining their product. I asked what its differentiators were versus our competitors. The team replied that ours was written in Go. #faceplam

The Rust rewrites can become tiresome, they have become a meme at this point, but there are really good tools there too.

An example from my personal experience: I used to think that oxipng was just a faster optipng. I took a closer look recently and saw that it is more than that.

See: https://op111.net/posts/2025/09/png-compression-oxipng-optip...

If a new tool has actual performance or feature advantages, then that's the answer to "what problem does it solve", regardless of what language it's in.

Bingo.

> but there are really good tools there too.

That's the problem. How good they are ? Who can tell ? The basic UNIX tools didn't come in "one day" like most of these "rust tools".

That is a differentiator if your competitors are written in Python or Ruby or Bash or whatever. But yeah obviously for marketing to normal people you'd have to say "it's fast and reliable and easy to distribute" because they wouldn't know that these are properties of Go.

You can write slow unmaintainable brittle garbage in any language though. So even if your competition is literally written in Bash or whatever you should still say what your implementation actually does better - and if it's performance, back it up with something that lets me know you have actually measured the impact on real world use cases and are not just assuming "we wrote it in $language therefore it must be fast".

> You can write slow unmaintainable brittle garbage in any language though.

Sure. You can drive really slowly in a sports car. But if you're looking for travel options for a long distance journey are you going to pick the sports car or the bicycle.

Also I have actually yet to find slow unmaintainable brittle garbage written in Go or Rust. I'm sure it's possible but it's vastly less likely.

> Also I have actually yet to find slow unmaintainable brittle garbage written in Go or Rust. I'm sure it's possible but it's vastly less likely.

Citation needed. /s

No. The differentiator is whatever benefits such an implementation might deliver (e.g., performance, reliability, etc.). Customers don’t start whipping out checkbooks when you say, “Ours is written in Go.”

That is what the post you responding to is saying

I’m still responding to the first sentence. It’s not a differentiator, even to smart engineers who understand the programming language in question (e.g., Go or Rust). Whenever an engineer leads with the programming language, I know that it’s just their favorite. You can write great Python, Ruby, Go or Rust, or you can write crappy Python, Ruby, Go, or Rust. Yes, some languages make more sense for certain environments (probably don’t want to do kernel programming in Ruby, for instance), but the programming language is never the differentiator itself. It’s what you make happen with it.

> You can write great Python, Ruby, Go or Rust, or you can write crappy Python, Ruby, Go, or Rust. ... the programming language is never the differentiator itself

This is called "the fallacy of grey". Very common.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac...

TypeScript is the one true language that will bind them all in servitude.

Many of the entries do include this detail — e.g. "with syntax highlighting", "ncurses interface", and "more intuitive". I agree that "written in rust", "modern", and "better" aren't very useful!

Some of this just makes me think that they are compared against the wrong tool though. E.g.

> cat clone with syntax highlighting and git integration

doesn't make any sense because cat is not really meant for viewing files. You should be comparing your tool with the more/less/most family of tools, some of which can already do syntax highlighting or even more complex transforms.

Yup, I made that same point in another comment. Out of interest, though, how do you get syntax highlighting from any of those pagers? None of them give it to me out of the box.

Pipe it through vim ? /s

Also using a non GPL license does not count.

A lot of those tools are also usable on windows thats why i like them.

It seems for most of them, the primary goal is improved UX.

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