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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Why Rust? It doesn't really compete with Go anywhere.

I guess people compare Rust and Go because they were released in similar timeframes and people like to view things in competition.

Rust is especially attractive when you can't afford a garbage collector, need deterministic destruction, and full compatibility with C. It's what C++ would be if it could start from scratch.

I think your point needs to be re-iterated more often: if garbage collection and ~2-3x the running time of C is not a problem, OCaml, Haskell, Scala, F#, etc. are the competition of Go. They integrate modern (read: mostly 70ies/80ies) language design insights, while providing approximately the same performance as Go.

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Great points, esp on Go vs real competition. It's why I'm against their modernized ALGOL68. Languages such as Haskell, Clojure, Rust, Julia, Scala, Ocaml, and others are at least trying to apply lessons learned in programming research to improve things for programmers. Google would've been better off taking one of the more native ones, identifying its worst issues, using their geniuses to fix those, and then building tools + community on that.

Instead, we get an alternative to unsafe, native and safe, scripting languages without most advantages of the best of either. I might still try it out if I do a comparative evaluation of modern work. By that time, it might have gotten better.

> similar timeframes

I hope you understand first stable release of Rust happened less than 2 weeks ago (15 May 2015), vs. Go's Go 1 in March 2012.

3 years is pretty big difference.

I hope you understand first stable release of Rust happened less

Of course, but Rust has been in tech news for a while already. E.g., the Rust 0.1 post garnered 82 comments[1], over 3 years ago. Rust seems to be first mentioned in a submission title 5 years ago.

Of course, their inception was not exactly at the same time. But if we look back in 20 years, it's the same timeframe. Just like e.g. Python and Ruby, despite being 4 years apart. Or C and Pascal.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3501980

I find your perspective a little bizarre. For instance, if we look on a galactic time scale, Lisp and Go were created at pretty much the same instant!

It's not fair to Rust to compare it to Go, as if they are at the same stage of their adoption and development. Several years is makes a big difference in the tech world.

Err, wat.

It seems ridiculously reasonable to compare programming languages on the time-scale of modern computing (~70 years). Dismissing the comparison like that is pretty crazy.

However, don't get me wrong: I totally agree that the years between the stable releases of the projects makes a big difference, especially now, while it is such a large percentage of the total lifetime of them.

Go was first publicly announced in November 2009, Rust in July 2010.

At the time of its announcement, Go was tremendously further along in its development than Rust was at its own public announcement. Knowing modern Go, you can go back and understand Go code from 2009. Knowing modern Rust, trying to read code from 2010 is essentially impossible.

I wouldn't say "further along". Deciding to not tackle any medium-to-hard problems just allowed them to be finished far earlier with their language.

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