Hacker News Reader

Comment by clktmr | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much what I am thinking. When I use Rust, at the end of the day I will have spent more time with the language instead of my actual task, and I don't see this changing given the rate Rust is still changing. It feels like you have to be a "programming language afficionado" to use Rust properly.

Whereas in Go, there is always only one reasonable way to do a specific task. You almost forget about the language and just get stuff done.

View on HN

Here is a very practical example.

We chose Rust for the current project because our Python program took more than 1TB of RAM. Rust program carefully manually laying out memory takes 75G. Other choices in this case are C/C++, but after you get a hang of Rust, it's actually easier because you don't spend days inspecting core dumps in gdb: once it compiles it actually works.

What kind of program requires that much ram?

> What kind of program requires that much ram?

Elasticsearch is written in Java, and routinely uses 30GB+ of RAM. I suspect if it was written in Python, it would use an order of magnitude more.

I think you are confusing VM with RSS memory metrics. Elasticsearch is not using routinely 30GB+ of RAM, I am using it on machines that have a lot less RAM. You can additionally set how much RAM you want to give to JVM.

It would depend on the data set you want cached in memory I would think? And you set that in a configuration file I suppose. You can probably set it to use 128MB or RAM too.

An in-memory database essentially

That's why I was drawn to Python, and I still haven't found a good reason to switch to Go in my use cases.

If you don't care about performance, there's no reason to switch. Python is easy but it's very slow.

Python is only easy to write. Managing environments, dependencies, deployment, tooling, etc are all abysmal and Go gets very high marks in all of these areas (including ease-of-writing).

> If you don't care about performance

Or parallelism, or compiled binaries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com