Go vs Rust vs Insert Language Here

Programming language wars have been waged for a long time. I was fortunate to understand early on that the language you use is arbitrary, it is the problem that matters. You will often hear the phrase “use the right tool for the job”, and this applies with programming languages.

In my opinion, you cant be a programmer in todays world without having knowledge of at least a second or third language. The reason I say this, is because there will be some cases where a language doesnt make sense. For example you would not want to use C/C++ for a REST API, or interpreted languages when speed is a concern.

The question then shifts to “when do you know which language to use when?”, and the answer to that comes with experience. The quickest way to get this experience is to implement common programs (such as a calculator, guessing game, typing practice game, website, …) in the languages you are wondering about.

For example in my case, I started to learn Rust because I wanted to see if it would be a better option for a web crawling library than Go. After implementing a concurrent web crawler in Rust, I realized how much different the functional programming paradigm is. Since the difference is so great, and the cases where I would use Rust are so little, I chose to stick with Go.

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Tags:

#go #rust #language-wars