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Comment by ks2048 | Hacker News Reader

ks2048

For a lot of scripts (think replacement to bash scripts - perhaps even one-offs), Python will save time over rust compilation times.

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Golang it is then! I'm really enjoying the fast compile time compared to C++...

And packaging + distribution is ridiculously easy.

We are moving every script we can to Go. Compared to bash it's a no-brainer, every dev can understand it, it has approximately .0000000000001% of the possible footguns, a great debugger, etc.

At the scale of “bash scripts”, rust will compile instantly unless you’ve gone insane with dependencies

For one offs, sure. But once you get to a script executed multiple times it doesn't take very long before you have payed off the rust compile time. Especially if it is fairly simple (as in, you can do everything with just rust std lib and not a bunch of rust libs).

Almost all the rust compilation times come from needing to build the supporting libs. For simple scripts, it's very possible to get away with just using the std lib.

At the same time, If a python script can be thrown together in 20 minutes, and it will execute hundreds of times at most..... Who really cares if it takes 25 seconds to execute, or 2 minutes as long as it accomplishes all it is intended to do?

In my opinion, what is pretty typical a script will be executed never, once, or thousands of times.

If you are at the point of doing multiple executions, you are probably at the point where converting your script to rust would end up saving time/power. Maybe not all the time (like a manually executed script), but not infrequently.

There are D, Go, C#, OCaml as an option, not only Rust.

Non-optimized builds can be pretty quick, although I guess you're always paying for borrow checking.

Being a local property, borrow checking is cheap. IIRC even Polonius is single digit percent in the worst case on crater runs.

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