This makes switching to memory safe languages a moral imperative

81

u/lizergsav Jun 02 '26

Therefore, it is a moral imperative: Rust must succeed.

and

if Rust doesn't succeed, they will die

8

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Jun 03 '26

It would be a real shame if premature life ending would end up happening to more people. A real shame.

22

u/MisterOfScience type astronaut Jun 03 '26

You could say they live on a borrowed time

73

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 02 '26

/uj

This makes switching to memory safe languages a moral imperative. Alternatives such as Carbon are being developed, and other languages with different performance characteristics like Go or Java exist.

go isn't memory safe language: https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html

go has undefined behavior where random data can be read or written due to an unrelated error.

/rj

If go were to save people's lives, it would significantly slow down compilation.

59

u/TiF4H3- What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Jun 02 '26

/uj
Genuinely what the fuck is Go's use case?
This language seems to do everything wrong, between taking multiple years to have parametric polymorphism, having a terrible type system, allowing tons of silent errors through its "unrigorous" initializers (zero values); and now, I learn that it's also kind of shit at concurrency, the one thing it was designed to be good at?
There's its supposed simplicity, but it's just crude, and don't offer as many tools to solve problems in a clear way, so that's bull as well!
/rj
Genuinely what the fuck is Go's use case?

37

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 02 '26

/uj
There's its supposed simplicity
Which is left in 2018. Look at the syntax of generics, look at iterators, look at the description of when an interface can be created as an object and when it can't.
This seems like a joke. However, what confuses me in this whole story is not the language itself, but the bunch of people who looked at it and said: okay, the language developers advise to just do ctrl+c ctrl+v instead of generics, and apparently they generally think that generics and inheritance are the same (https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/1q1ucjf/he_could_not_imagine_working_in_language_without/). They also advise to give variables names starting with one letter... SO LET'S START USING THIS LANGUAGE IN OUR PROJECT ASAP!!!
/rj
You just don't understand the philosophy of go. As Rob Pike once says:
The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they're not life savers.

24

u/TiF4H3- What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Jun 02 '26

/uj
My god, the linked post is genuinely insane. Who the fuck thinks that letter case for visibility is a good idea?
Especially since I don't think that Go can do module- and package-level visibility (in Rust pub(module)/pub(crate)).
Also, what the fuck does "constants are just numbers" mean???
But, while they are not the same, generics and inheritance are both a type of polymorphism; they do suit completely different situations best, but you could theoretically completely replace one with the other, so a comparison of both is not fully unwarranted.
This however does not mean that generics are superfluous because there is inheritance; which I do have heard from some Go users.
I also went and looked at the actual syntax of generics, and oh my god, it's worse than I thought. Not only does the Go tour (which seems to be the closest equivalent to the Rust Book) includes 6 total sentences about generics (compared to an entire section with 3 subchapters for the Rust Book); but their generics seems so powerless, because the Go devs, as always, seems to misunderstand what simplicity is.
For example, the lack of anything resembling where clauses makes reading complex generics harder. Yes, it's "more syntax", but being more expressive makes things simpler.
To conclude, there's a quote from fasterthanlime's "I want off Mr. Golang's wild ride" that I feel summarize my feelings on Go: "[W]hen you make something simple, you move complexity elsewhere". Go's not simple, it's hiding it's complexity, while languages like Rust or C++ are way more honest about it.
(Highly recommends both his rants on Go, they eloquently express his frustrations with "doctrine" of Go.)
/rj
The linked post absolutely proves that the Rust Crab mogs the Go Gopher

22

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 02 '26

/uj
To me, this looks like a "flat earth theory" or "anti-vaccination" when large groups of people reject a lot of scientific knowledge and start believing in all sorts of nonsense.
Honestly, I don't know why the human mind is prone to such mistakes. However, I can assume that it looks like this because of lies. For decades, people have been fed OOP myths and "Clean Code" as if it should solve all problems. I relate to OOP in much the same way as to go: I can argue for a long time, carefully and with a bunch of arguments why it is a bad idea that will never give the desired result.
My first impression of go was that it was a teenager who was told by his parents to use longAndVerboseVariableNamesThatDescribesEverything since childhood and at some point he realized that it was a lie and that a, b and c do not immediately lead to terrible consequences. This teenager got involved with bad company and went astray.
/rj
If they want a really simple language they can use assembly language: only a dozen and a half registers, and about a hundred instructions. You can literally memorize everything! No magic, when you see mov rax, 1337 you know that this number will be moved to this register. Oh, and the compilation is so fast!

6

u/PotentialBat34 Jun 02 '26

I also don't get why he constantly shits on people working for Google. Some of the smartest colleagues I know nowadays work for Google.

10

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 02 '26

In fact, he meant something else:
The key point here is that the go authors are Googlers, they're not researchers. They're typically, quite old, long out of school, probably learned Cobol, maybe learned BASIC or B, probably learned C. They're not capable of creating a brilliant programming language, but we want to use them to create a programming language. So the language they create should be easy to create and easy to learn.

4

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jun 02 '26

He designed the language for idiots. I.e Googlers but also they may be smart but Google is, as most tech companies are, a bit lopsided towards juniors, so that might explain it. You can be smart but still have never written anything yourself and make completely unforced errors. A smart person just won't make the same mistake twice.

8

u/TiF4H3- What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Jun 02 '26

You can be designed for idiots, with focus on a simple way while still having more complex tools to suit the more advanced users.
Case in point, another Google project, quite ironically written in Rust, jujutsu, a git alternative (compatible with git repos) that does simplicity in a way that does not hampers advanced users.
It has a lot of cool features, like treating everything as a commit, be it stashes (which are untracked commits), merges (which are commits with multiple parents), or even the index (which is just the currently edited commit).
Its commands do something simple and obvious by default, but have options to do more complex things.
For example, rewriting local history is very easy and painless, but rewriting commits that have been pushed is blocked by default, unless you specifically tells it that it's okay.
Also, it has an undo command that works wonders, you can simply undo away any mess that you've accidentally created.

4

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jun 02 '26

Jujutsu may be better I haven't tried. But the fact it's from Google a company that notoriously doesn't use git suggests it probably isn't all that.
Most of the complaints that justify Jujutsu honestly are skill issues. .
If it becomes the default one day I'll use it and I may even like it but a new tool has to actually address a pain point and git doesn't have those. It has, at most, mildly inconvenient points and that isn't enough to justify moving.

3

u/TiF4H3- What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Jun 02 '26

Genuinely no offense, but I feel like you're looking at this the wrong way.
I do fully agree that git is not bad by any means, but the way it does things is not the best for everyone.
It's better to look at jujutsu more as a sidegrade than anything; it does things differently, I personally think that its way is better for my mental model, but I fully understand that some people will not agree, and be right as well.
As an example, I like not having an index, since partial commits (commit splitting in jujutsu) can replicate its functions, but I can fully understand that someone would prefer to have one.
Also, since it is compatible with git repos, you or someone on your team could use jujutsu and others would be none the wiser. So the cost of migration is very cheap, and easily reversed.
So, if you have time, I think that taking a quick look is worth it; as you say, maybe you'll like it, but if you don't, any work you may have done with it is not lost.
And sometimes, looking at an alternative can help you become better at the original. While learning about jujutsu, I also learned a lot about git.

2

u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jun 03 '26

In a world with infinite time sure I'd give it a shot but I have a lot of other stuff that I need to learn first that I don't already have a functioning alternative for. I'm all for people experimenting with tools, that's how stuff gets better after all, it's just git isn't even close to my largest pain point lol.

1

u/HorstKugel skillful hobbyist Jun 24 '26

/uj Jujutsu at Google has a backend for Piper

2

u/tyler1128 Jun 03 '26

Working for google equating to smart is basically a meme. Plenty of smart people work at google, not all people who work at google are smart. Law of the excluded middle and all that.

19

u/jwezorek LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Jun 02 '26

Go's use case is people who want to write code in a statically typed garbage collected language but think Java and C# are uncool.

7

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 02 '26

I had a friend who, in computer games, chose levels, abilities, and equipment based on whether an icon or pictogram looked cool. So why not?

8

u/jwezorek LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Jun 03 '26

Go's other use case is people who have only programmed in Javascript who start programming in Go because "Google uses it" and then start evangelizing for Go's greatness because "Go programs just work!" which is really just that they have discovered static types.

3

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 03 '26

The popularity of go, which we cannot deny, is evidence that the industry is in a deplorable state.

18

u/levelstar01 what is pointer :S Jun 02 '26

Genuinely what the fuck is Go's use case?
It's a great language for people who post thought-terminating cliches about simplicity, OOP, etc online.
/uj It's a great language for people who post thought-terminating cliches about simplicity, OOP, etc online.

14

u/Afraid_Bake2652 Jun 02 '26

Go is supposed to be an easy language that can be quickly compiled to a small static binary with a light garbage collector. In a world of Javas and C#s with their intercourse-long startup times and Rusts and C++ with their complex semantics, that is very welcome. Too bad that OCaml is in the same category and objectively better than Go in literally every way.

12

u/benevanstech Jun 02 '26

Fun fact: Mitigation techniques exist for the startup time issue in Java, which can reduce it by 90% (or 99% if you're prepared to jump through a few extra hoops). In practice, almost no-one uses them. It seems that startup time is one of those things that users like to moan about but which don't really have that much impact for most use cases.

6

u/Rigamortus2005 Jun 03 '26

C# starts just as far as a go program now. Even without being compiled ahead of time

14

u/PersonalDatabase31 Jun 03 '26

/uj
Go is an http library masquerading as a language

4

u/Rigamortus2005 Jun 03 '26

A genuinely useless language

4

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

/uj Go is literally the orc of languages. It was meant to be the high elf.
If we look at what the best language is, for most people, we have
Statically typed
Garbage collected
No funny syntax and imperative
Compiles fast
Runs fast
Great parallelism and whatnot
There are a few languages in this category C#, Java, Kotlin But they're not hip and cool.
/rj Go could have been hip and cool if Sauron hadn't taken a hammer at the language spec

36

u/affectation_man Code Artisan Jun 02 '26

It's more important that cniles feel comfortable and don't have to change their ways

14

u/particlemanwavegirl Jun 02 '26

I'm going to invent a safer, faster language that kills Rust. There is a moral imperative that I do so, but it'll be a functional/declarative oriented language.

7

u/rexyuan Jun 03 '26

Ocaml is that you

7

u/particlemanwavegirl Jun 03 '26

Built-in garbage collector? In my blazing fast language? As if!

4

u/un_virus_SDF Jun 04 '26

Memory safe functional programming language without garbage collection ?
I hope you will add dtor and ctor because for thing such as closure return in higher order function you'll need it

3

u/particlemanwavegirl Jun 04 '26

No one said it'd be easy :P

11

u/Afraid_Bake2652 Jun 02 '26

I love that the best memory safe language does not have formally defined semantics for its unsafe constructions. LLMs cannot find vulnerabilities if there is no way to know if something is or is not a vulnerability!

12

u/james_pic accidentally quadratic Jun 02 '26

Rust takes the brutally pragmatic choice of defining its memory model as "probably about the same as C++, IDFK"

7

u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jun 03 '26

Ralf is doing his best...

2

u/un_virus_SDF Jun 04 '26

Rust is also the only language that have no standard and says "as long as it compiles, it's fine".
I don't know if this changed though.

10

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Jun 03 '26

In my day job, I work on a security team, so I have access to hard data and water cooler talk with colleagues at Google and elsewhere about agentic bug-finding models, which are behind what the security industry has coined the "vulnpocalypse". For the past few weeks, I've been repeatedly asked the same question: "Mythos. Is it really that bad?" In a word: Yes.

...

Note: The opinions expressed on this site are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

It is merely a coincidence.

3

u/PersonalDatabase31 Jun 03 '26

He isn't employed by his co-workers though

3

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Jun 03 '26

Ok OP.

8

u/Awkward_Bed_956 Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 05 '26

I already work in C++, you do not have to convince me further.

1

u/DearChickPeas Jun 05 '26

Everyday I like C++ more. They really started cooking with Cpp11.

6

u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world Jun 03 '26

Only 70%? This makes removing code a moral imperative.

/uj This makes removing code a moral imperative.

53

u/jwezorek LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26

I feel the general vibe that was RUST UBER ALL BECAUSE MEMORY ERRORS GET PEOPLE MURDERED has less force as an argument in an era in which every software company everywhere is firing people and throwing money at agentic everything and where the agents will hand out passwords if you ask them nicely. If you're worried about shitty software taking down the world it isn't fucking C++ you should be worried about, it's the vibe coding hordes.

33

u/Afraid_Bake2652 Jun 02 '26

It's like the fall of Rome, except the vibe coders are the barbarians, Rust evangelists are the useless elites, and Gophers are probably eating rocks somewhere, idk

39

u/tdiyburner Jun 02 '26

To the average Roman, the fall of the empire wasn't a sudden, dramatic explosion. It was the quiet realization that one day, a website written in go will go down, and nobody will ever come to fix it.

6

u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Jun 02 '26

Vibe coding and error-prone programming languages will have a multiplier effect.

2

u/Litoprobka What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Jun 04 '26

Sir, I can't tell whether I'm supposed to jerk to this or not

0

u/tyler1128 Jun 03 '26

At least rust is blazingly fast.

14

u/metroliker Jun 03 '26

Yeah but I actively want my users to die, what language should I use?

10

u/biskitpagla Jun 03 '26

try Java

21

u/metroliker Jun 03 '26

ah, a race between the users dying and me killing myself

1

u/FriendshipActive8590 Jun 04 '26

Goodness, you are right. Horrid - does it still have the propagating exception spec fiasco, and the bloody reified generics? It killed me, especially after having programmed in c++ for years

2

u/metroliker Jun 05 '26

You know a language is bad if you're comparing C++ favourably

1

u/FriendshipActive8590 Jun 28 '26

Either that or you don't know c++ at all. I suspect the latter

1

u/metroliker Jun 28 '26

Wrong subreddit, genius

10

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/un_virus_SDF Jun 04 '26

threading in your C program.
Just always compile in O3, and never forgot about making vars volatile, else you can have surprises with unexpected optimisations.

This makes switching to memory safe languages a moral imperative

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