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Discussion on: Why there seem to be less opportunities in Rust (right now) ?

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kunde21 profile image
Chad Kunde

There are a lot of misconceptions about both Rust and Go, but I think the biggest is that they're competitors. They've been complimentary since day one, because they solve different problems.

Even the major rewrite stories (cloudflare, dropbox, etc) will tell you that it's not one or the other (both serve web traffic and backend logic on different stacks) because it's still about "the best tool for the job," in the end.

When you're looking at web traffic, Go is in its element. Highly concurrent, simple grammar, fast compile, quick development. Great!

But that's not going to handle the problems encountered on dropbox's storage layer. That's not web traffic. Why would we expect the same design to handle both? We shouldn't!

When we're in the zone of low-level data/storage interaction, C++/Rust are in their element. They're going to make every bit and byte count, as fast as possible. You pay the price in extra development time, because the rewards are huge performance increases in the low-level operations.

The right tool for the job. Hammer, crowbar, or programming language: they all know when to shine.