Hacker News Reader

Comment by parhamn | Hacker News Reader

Wait what?! Most of the major go libs (std and not) have been stable for years. Rust is merging random syntaxes and random packages get upgraded to std lib all the time.

The package ecosystem was so stable that go didn’t ship with a package manager (not saying it’s good but definitely a sign of relative stability).

Besides nil pointers (typesystem could do better here) and bad logic (can’t do better but language simplicity reduces this), what you’re saying is definitely not the experience of the majority. People constantly talk about being able to go to a golang program from 8 years ago and run it with no problems. Rust changes every few weeks.

View on HN

> People constantly talk about being able to go to a golang program from 8 years ago and run it with no problems. Rust changes every few weeks.

You stated that "Rust is merging random syntaxes and random packages get upgraded to std lib all the time" as though it were incompatible with "being able to go to a program from 8 years ago and run it with no problems". But there's no incompatibility here. Rust adds new features at a faster rate than Go does, but it also maintains backwards compatibility ("stability without stagnation").

Sure, I conflated 'still compiles' with 'still the right pattern'. Its sorta like Javascript, ECMAscript has been backwards compatible but the ecosystem is a consistently moving target that users have to adopt their code to or feel left behind. E.g crossbeam and parkinglot. Also the bunch of nightly features that disappear but many use.

Sure the mainline stays clean but thats not what matters in practice.

> The package ecosystem was so stable that go didn’t ship with a package manager (not saying it’s good but definitely a sign of relative stability).

Which also explains why you can git clone a Go library/tool and have it not building because some dependencies introduced some breaking changes in the master branch. That happened the last 3 times I wanted to fix something in a Go project.

I don’t know what Rust you’ve been using, but they’ve been explicitly having all changes be backwards compatible since 2016 - when they hit 1.0 - with a few small changes in 2018.

> Rust is merging random syntaxes and random packages get upgraded to std lib all the time.

I really don't know where this is coming from. The only package that was included into std like this is replacing the hashmap with hashbrown, and this didn't even change the public api of the standard library at all, besides improving performance of the hashmap.

Not to mention go compiles at the speed of light, so CI pipes are usually just rebuild and rerun the entire suite on every commit, so idk how such bugs would lurk unless the tests were lackluster. Which happens, I totally understand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com