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Comment by green-bottle | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit tired of seeing this topic come up again and again on Reddit or HN. You may have as well, asked if someone preferred blue or orange.

The choice of a programming language (without considering specific details of the application) is very subjective with a low signal to noise ratio. What looks aesthetic or ergonomic for others will most likely not apply to you.

For most practical applications things like the runtime, library ecosystem and other factors become more important and just "Rust or Golang for backend development?" isn't very helpful.

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Also, why is the question always “Rust or go?”, excluding all other languages?

If that is “because those are the hip languages”, that’s not a good reason to make a choice for years. How long will they stay hip?

If it is an ideological choice, I don’t understand what the ideology is. Go is not more open than, say, C#, Java, or Swift (all open source, but backed by a huge company that largely controls the evolution of the language).

Rust is more of an underdog, being backed by a relatively, smaller player.

So, what’s the argument to limit the choice to these two?

> library ecosystem and other factors become more important

I guess this is what OP is asking here

But what you need out of those "other factors" varies based on your business requirements, which OP didn't share. What we're going to end up with (what we always end up with in these kind of threads) is ~35% of comments are from folks who've only ever used Go, so they suggest Go. ~35% are from those who've only used Rust, and they suggest Rust. ~20% are from people who've used both but in wildly different environments such that it's hard to do any real comparison. The remaining ~10% or less who have used both languages in suitably similar production-level environments are going to be split more-or-less evenly between the two because they've had different business constraints. An exceedingly small minority will have used both in the same business environment, and they're going to suggest whichever one they used second.

And that's even ignoring the much more important fact that there are about 50 other back-end languages that are likely as good or better candidates, but not trendy enough to warrant mentioning.

But what is the downside to what you are saying ? We have experiences from golang devs and rust devs all available to be compared here in a thread and other thread (the discussions change as time changes)

Isn't this why we are here ? Share what you have experience with, who even knows everything ?

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