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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

Nice! As a reluctant Go developer, I look at rust with envy and excitement. I am very eager to see this project progress and it seems like they've got some great people on it.

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I share your envy and excitement.

I'm looking forward to dumping Go in favor of Rust once it's competitive in terms of libraries/stdlib. I've been building some big stuff in Go recently (mostly around financial market simulation) and the language shortcomings have hurt a lot. I've been using Go since January 2013 as my primary language, but everything I've seen of and tried with Rust is amazing.

What are the shortcomings?

From what I gather, lack of user defined generics is primary reason, followed by the loose typing in interfaces.

I'm not an expert in Go, so feel free to correct me there. Additionally, IIRC Rust wanted to take the same route like GO regarding interfaces and generics, but Niko made an argument that it is wrong turn to make.

  > IIRC Rust wanted to take the same route like GO 
  > regarding interfaces and generics, but Niko made an 
  > argument that it is wrong turn to make.

This is a mistaken conception, as Rust has had something approximating generics since the very beginning (though they have changed drastically since the outset), and traits have always been explicit rather than implicit (and it was pcwalton who initially conceived traits, not nmatsakis (and traits as well have changed drastically since their inception (the bottom line is that pretty much everything about Rust has changed drastically since its inception))).

Personally, I just don't enjoy developing in it. And really, it's all the "meta" features that I can't stand, like the package/module system that is too opinionated and not intuitive enough, the annoying install system, and the folder structure. The language itself isn't fun enough to warrant looking beyond these downsides.

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