Go: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious… First encounters Over a decade ago, I worked on a technology to which a competitor paid the highest possible compliment: they tried to implement their own knockoff. Because this was done in the open (and because it is uniquely mesmerizing to watch one’s own work mimicked), I spent way too much time following their mailing list and tracking their progress (and yes, taking an especially shameful delight in their occasional feuds). On their team, there was one technologist who was clearly exceptionally capable – and I confess to being relieved when he chose to leave the team relatively early in the project’s life. This was all in 2005; for years for me, Rust was “that thing that Graydon disappeared to go work on.” From the description as I read it at the time, Graydon’s new project seemed outrageously ambitious – and I assumed that little would ever come of it, though certainly not for lack of ability or effort…

Originally published at the Telia Engineering BlogA month ago I have started learning Rust and would like to share my impressions, the good things I have appreciated, and the things I have struggled with. Why Rust, do you ask? Primarily to challenge myself, to leave the land of managed runtimes (Clojure, JavaScript) and to get as close to the metal as you can without assembly. Knowing a systems (&more) programming language is handy, for example for writing fast serverless functions and command-line utilities. Why not Go? For the same reasons why Clojure: it is more innovative, more mind-bending. Go is optimized, I understand, for approachability (and performance, of course) and is popular for writing web services - but it failed to capture the C/C developers at Google it was aimed at, I hear. Rust's focus is on performance and safety, the latter forcing it to take a really innovative approach to the issue of memory management. And some experienced C/C developers swear by it. So Rust already seemed more attractive to me and reading Bryan Cantrill’s Falling in love with Rust and Sylvain Wallez' Go: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly sealed the deal. From the former:Rust feels like a distillation of the best work that came before it.Platforms reflect their values, and I daresay the propagation operator is an embodiment of Rust’s: balancing elegance and expressiveness with robustness and performance.

When I was deciding what new language to learn, I could have picked the quite familiar Scala but chose instead Clojure - not despite of its lack of object-orientation, its immutable data structures, its too many parentheses on a single line - but because of it. (And because of Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages.) Why?!

Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious… First encounters Over a decade ago, I worked on a technology to which a competitor paid the highest possible compliment: they tried to implement their own knockoff. Because this was done in the open (and because it is uniquely mesmerizing to watch one’s own work mimicked), I spent way too much time following their mailing list and tracking their progress (and yes, taking an especially shameful delight in their occasional feuds). On their team, there was one technologist who was clearly exceptionally capable – and I confess to being relieved when he chose to leave the team relatively early in the project’s life. This was all in 2005; for years for me, Rust was “that thing that Graydon disappeared to go work on.” From the description as I read it at the time, Graydon’s new project seemed outrageously ambitious – and I assumed that little would ever come of it, though certainly not for lack of ability or effort…