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Comment by winrid | Hacker News Reader

The Python GC is slow, but predictable. I've seen the Node runtime falls apart past like 8gb heap all the time, but I have python scripts that run just fine with a 32gb heap.

Requiring the max old space flag is already too much. It's annoying.

Python does indeed have some runtime type safety. Way more than any JS runtime I've used. And I've written way more Node/JS/TS than Python.

In terms of the compiler, Nah. The whole ecosystem stinks. I cannot wait to move my larger Node projects to Java or something else. Idk how much dev time people waste on arcane tsc or npm issues but the answer is "too high" regardless. At least esbuild is okay.

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I spent a good chunk of last year learning go, and felt dumber for doing so. I feel like Rust is the way to go in 2023 and beyond -- particularly if the rustaceans can get past their own stupidity.

I haven't used go for some reason but it always looked nice. I like the simplicity, for some things. I know old C programmers trying to write web services in C (with hand rolled json...) and I wish I could get them using Go. :)

Rust is neat. I wrote a decent sized side project backend (weatherfy.com) in Rust, with sqlx, postgres, and axum. Shared cache was tough to figure out but everything else was easy.

The whole backend has like one lifetime annotation, so that wasn't too bad. Honestly, I'd use it again, but the compile times scare me.

There's a bunch of negatives I found. I'll gloss over them here.

- New libraries can't just be deployed to the OS, they must be compiled into the project.

- A check for thing==nil doesn't always work for all types of nil. Yes nil does not always equal nil.

- Panics aren't necessarily a bug. They could be a feature (?). Crashes are always a bug in C.

- Garbage collection is mandatory in go. C people are used to managing memory themselves like going for a walk. It's kinda natural.

- GC causes hard to debug performance issues. This was true in Java. And it's true in Golang.

- Golang channel primitives has bugs of their own with deadlocks and other interesting behaviors, whereas a lot of the threading issues in C are pretty well understood.

You cannot really compare Rust and Go.

Rust is for when you really need to perform manual memory management. If you don't need that, then a GC language is better.

If you're choosing manual memory management over GC, you better have a really good reason to do so or a really small application that you're writing.

Literally the whole point of rust is to not do manual memory management and let a compiler handle that for you.

> Literally the whole point of rust is to not do manual memory management and let a compiler handle that for you.

Incorrect. The compiler forces you to handle memory properly. It doesn't, as far as I know, manage it for you.

The burden is on the programmer to do it correctly. The compiler stops the programmer from doing it incorrectly.

Compare with GC, where the programmer is freed from the burden of worrying about memory altogether.

I would make a distinction between managing memory (malloc, free) and then subsequently handling said memory in a safe manner.

The first part Rust does for you.

The second part you'll indeed have to do yourself and the compiler will force you to do it safely.

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