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Comment by octo_t | Hacker News Reader

Well rust doesn't have garbage collection, its designed to replace* the languages that coreutils are currently written in - C (I don't think any gnu coreutils are written in C++). Go is not designed to replace these languages.

*by replace I mean occupy some of their current marketshare.

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Very few of the coreutils would be affected by gc. You could probably write them all to barely allocate memory other than at startup if you wanted, and most of the garbage would be produced by the parsing.

Simply comparing the two based on GC is very superficial.

But if GC doesn't matter, then why Go and not something like Lua?

Not really. The day my `cat` pauses to GC is the day I leave this field...

Why? Do you think you would notice?

(I realize your post may have been tongue in cheek, but it can be hard to tell on the interwebs.)

interestingly, Go was originally envisioned to do exactly this - a systems development language

Well, they used the phrase "systems language" when they introduced it, and it still appears prominently in the FAQ, but what they had in mind vis-a-vis what-exactly-constitutes-a-system was very different. (They were thinking more along the lines of a cloud infrastructure language.)

If you watch this excellent panel discussion from this year, you can hear Rob Pike express how they later regretted how their poor choice of terminology created such confusion:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Pan...

(approx 6 minutes 45 seconds into the talk)

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