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Comment by pmkary | Hacker News Reader

This officially proves how great the Go code is! I mean: You have easiness and friendliness and high level language of Go for only 50%~70% slower performance. I always thought what happens if they port to Rust? Will it also become an order of magnitude faster? Turns out it really is not worth the cost. Go is perhaps just the best language.

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Go is not higher level. If anything I would consider Rust higher on the abstraction ladder than Go. Or rather it's perhaps better to say that Rust is higher level but can go down to a lower level than Go.

I both agree with you and still think my initial idea was correct, and it means that I have expressed it very badly. What I meant by higher order was all the little niceties Go has that becomes a nightmare in Rust, the memory management, simple language; I mean just think about working with strings in Go vs Rust. The amount of boiler plate stuff always gives me a headache in Rust. But you're right, the map to C and C++ and go is orders of magnitude less developed in that terms.

How would rust be generally higher level then go?

In the sense that a coder can express abstractions in Rust that he cannot in Go.

So in a sense, cobol is a higher level language then both due to PIC Clauses? I don’t follow this if higher level languages is solely based on syntactic sugar.

I agree that "if higher level languages is solely based on syntactic sugar", then Rust is not any higher level than Go at least if you ignore the fact that Rust gives the coder the ability to define macros (which I'm happy to do because I don't like macros much).

The abstractions that Rust can express that Go cannot that I find very attractive are mostly restrictions: they give the coder a way to commit to behaving a certain way throughout the codebase. Sort of like OpenBSD's pledge and unveil system calls, but part of the language, not part of the OS. Of course the coder can back out of the commitment by removing the declarations that produced the commitment.

In general, any elaborate type system in any language (such as Rust has) can be fruitfully considered a way for a coder to impose restrictions on himself and any other coders editing the codebase for the benefit of anyone trying to understand the codebase.

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