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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

That's still an abstraction, just one built into the language. And Go's approach (as well as other things, like garbage collection) requires a runtime; while that does support an interesting programming model, it also makes Go unusable for a variety of use cases that need to run without a runtime.

This approach in Rust, as well as Rust's approach to memory management and other things, allow it to run without a runtime, which allows it to work for anything C does.

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There's another reason Rust's ecosystem uses futures (as opposed to having some library-based greenthreading system): each future is like the stack of a userspace thread, but perfectly sized (it will be as large as the largest stack space needed at a yield point). This reduces the memory footprint of services using futures.

What use cases need no runtime (genuine question)? I understand the benefit of being compiled, since you can target a cpu instruction set and run without dependencies.

Low-level firmware, embedded applications, OS kernels, interrupt service routines, applications that can't afford the latency of being periodically interrupted, platforms where you don't have a scheduler or most OS services, libraries intended to be loaded into other applications written in other languages (e.g. where you don't control the main program entry point), writing language runtimes themselves, etc.

Early Rust, pre-1.0, did have a runtime and a green-threads mechanism; they ripped it out because they recognized that they couldn't go everywhere they wanted to go if they kept it. And if they hadn't done that, I believe Rust would have been far less successful than it has been.

So I'm guessing it's the runtime itself that expects to interact with things like an OS scheduler. Does that mean if you attempted to write an OS in Go, you'd basically have to do it without many of the features of the runtime (that provide the abstractions that are useful for application progamming?). That would be pretty crummy.

> Does that mean if you attempted to write an OS in Go, you'd basically have to do it without many of the features of the runtime (that provide the abstractions that are useful for application progamming?). That would be pretty crummy.

You'd have to write the lowest-level of it in a language that wasn't Go. That language could be C, or Rust, or a pseudo-Go that didn't have many of the features people expect (including garbage collection and goroutines).

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