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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

I've been dabbling in Go, but I keep wondering if I would prefer Rust after reading articles like this...

You should! I used Go on a sizeable side project, and while I did enjoy it, I much prefer Rust. There's no doubt that Rust is harder to learn, but not pointlessly so; it's a learning exercise, especially if it's your first foray into low-level systems programming. Be patient, the payoff is worth the investment!

I dabbled in Go for a while too, but found I much prefer Rust, Elixir, and Crystal (even though it is still a bit immature). I know a lot of people love Go, but these other three languages speak to my soul.

You're making this decision even harder! I used Go a bit in the course I'm teaching this semester, so maybe next semester I'll teach with Rust :)

How does the concurrency model in Rust hold up when compared to Erlang/Elixir? Crystal's concurrency seemed lacking the last time I looked (which was a while ago).

The biggest difference is that Rust doesn't force a specific one on you. The language knows nothing about threads. It does have two special traits, Sync and Send, that should be used by any thread-related APIs for concurrency guarantees, and the stdlib thread API does use them.

But there are other concurrency/paralellism models beyond std::thread, including really cool stuff like "scoped threads", and more classic "single threaded event loop" stuff, or thread pools.

The big differentiator is that Rust proves code free from data races at compile time. Not the specific model.

Incidentally, you can write NIFs in Rust...

This begins to frame one of the problems I have lately. Dabbling in Go, dabbling in Erlang/Elixir, dabbling in Elm, dabbling in Rust...

From one dabbler to another, try dabbling in Common Lisp sometime, it might help in settling down...

Go is much easier to learn, and probably takes less time to develop with on average. Also, Rust is not really a Go competitor: https://dave.cheney.net/2015/07/02/why-go-and-rust-are-not-c...

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