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Comment by justinsaccount | Hacker News Reader

> For comparison, I switched from Rust to Go and, in the same amount of time I had spent stuggling to make even a <100 LOC partial implementation work, was able to write and test the entire exterior of an IRC server - all the socket-fu and concurrency handling - leaving only the IRC-protocol state machine to be done.

That's basically my experience with rust and go.

go is stupid, but I can write it. It's stupid needing to write the same for loop over and over again, but it's an obvious for loop that doesn't have any surprises, and everyones for loop looks the same.

rust is smart, but I can't write anything in it (yet). Some of rusts features would be nice to have in go.

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> same for loop over and over ... obvious for loop that does'nt have any surprises.

Really? Tell me what the output of this short bit of golang code is before running it then if it's so obvious. The first one is only a for loop, nothing else, the second output line is a for loop and some channels + goroutines, but nothing too complicated.

https://play.golang.org/p/g4Pd5ebrWp

I've seen these issues in the wild more times than I care to admit. Go is a trashfire. They wouldn't compile in rust.

Your code is tripping over a complexity of closures, not directly loops. I don't think you can write a straightforward loop that has confusing behaviour without also using closures. Your "but nothing too complicated" underplays that.

My first example did not have a closure. Simplified further: https://play.golang.org/p/ttdmropzSu

It's literally about nothing but how the 'value' variable in go for loops is handled by the language.

To make it worse, a common solution is to do this: https://play.golang.org/p/BTRs_TCQdu

That code looks like line 10 shouldn't be needed, does nothing, and during someone elses refactoring it might be deleted and result in the code blowing up again. No warnings, just silent data corruption.

The second one is a bit complicated, yes, but again I've seen them in the wild. Again they wouldn't have compiled in rust.

You're still being clever in that first example. `string` is a weird data type in Go, and `[]string` doubly so. You're going out of your way to find a confusing example, but that's not what the original poster was saying, which is that you can write a simple loop over and over again that doesn't have surprises.

Bah, the HN markup dropped my asterisks in those types.

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