Blain Smith

I love this line: > Stop shipping distributed systems when you meant to ship a feature. But not in the contex the author meant. Many people don't realize that when you have a frontend, a backend (several instances, for failover/scaling), a (separate) database, maybe some object store -- you have a distributed system. A recent article[0] touched on that, although most HN commenters[1] latched on the "go" part. But there's something to avoiding rube goldberg machines where we don't need them. [0] https://blainsmith.com/articles/just-fucking-use-go/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062997

The article seems to be just a way to say "Rust is better" - and it fails to do so by spreading misinformation such as the channels part (https://corrode.dev/learn/migration-guides/go-to-rust/#channels) or making a fair comparison of pprof vs Rust's flamegraph. It also skips entirely over debugging (delve vs gdb), IDE support, ecosystem (why the hell does Rust have N async runtimes?!), statically linking and so on. A comparison between the performance of RLS / rust-analyzer (painfully slow) and gopls would be enough to kill the whole argument about developer happiness and productivity. It even passes traits as a "reason to switch" to Rust - where in fact it would probably be a reason (IMHO) not to use it (together with lifetimes). I think both languages are amazing, so a migration Go -> Rust (or Rust -> Go) makes no sense most of the time. I've written code in both for a while now, so I know the pain and advantages of both. For example, Go sucks at microcontroller stuff - in fact it's not even Go officially (see my presentation about porting "Go" to an ESP32-S3 [1]) - whereas Rust is amazing and even has a strong project behind (https://esp.rs) and amazing tooling (probe-rs & co). What's also not addressed here is the Go ecosystem. The Go packages are one `go mod add` away (pkgs.go.dev) and the module owner guarantees v1 backwards compatibility for the whole lifetime of the module. This means that, no matter what happens, your dependencies will always be up-to-date…