- The paper: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/biscuit.pdf
- The code: https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit
Oh yeah another thing that just showed up on the front page actually, someone writing network drivers for their bachelor's thesis in Go:
https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/thes...
The nice system programming point would be (imho) clear syntax and safety check mechanics, like the borrow checker.
Things get even worse when you consider that there's already some lifetime elision happening in the general case, so if you were to write some form of "completely specified" rust things would be even worse.
Rust's borrow checker is a game changer, and it's benefit outweighs the lack of clear syntax (it's not worse than C++, or Perl at the very least). Then again, rust doesn't really compete with Go -- it can but I think that's more to do with how awesome rust is. There's currently some efforts to create an opt-in garbage collector called Shifgrethor[0] -- I wonder if programs made to run in that could be run in a syntactically stripped down version of rust that would make it amenable to scripting and golang-like usage. Given rust's macro system (which would be a crazy way to implement this imaginary functionality instead of a compiler plugin), this seems possible...
I'm already just a tad bit over Go for personal use (though it's still in my top 5), and often reach for rust because:
- I've paid the cost to somewhat understand the borrow checker (and I could see it as valuable)
- rust ecosystem is getting pretty big these days (lots of libs)
- community is great (for now, I actually think it is inevitable for it to degrade over time)
- generics when I need them, traits are fantastic (basically they're almost just like haskell typeclasses)
- rust can go from embedded systems (xMhz) to browser (via wasm), if I'm good at it I can almost literally do anything. It's got the macro support to make different domains easier (so embedded vs browser contexts can feel different if basic rust wasn't good enough)
I'm sold on Rust, but I don't think it has a chance to replace Java -- it's probably going to replace C/C++ though, but that will take longer because that world moves slower anyway.
I think they made a mistake using C++ style generic notation. D lang has a much, much nicer syntax for generics, and the language's readability would much improved with that syntax imo. As is, I find parsing the error messages that come back from type mismatches quite challenging. Reading documentation on traits on docs.rs, I find the actual trait name very hard to pick out in the noise. Maybe I'll get better with that over time.
If you're not doing type theory work or very specific exploration in a specific field, I don't know another language that is so easy to get up and running with. On top of all this go's performance is pretty great/consistent as well, JS is the only other scripting language that comes close generally, but then you have to submit to the event loop.
I've always thought one of Go's true killer features is how hard it makes cleverness.
I'm starting to seriously think Go's popularity is going to continue shooting up. As I always note I think Go will supplant Java as the incumbent in the enterprise software in one or two decades max.
[EDIT] - Forgot to include the most recent example that made me think this: WPaxos(AKA WAN Paxos)[0] and the included github repo[1]. To be fair CASPaxos[2] included gryadka[3] which is in JS.
[0]: https://cse.buffalo.edu/tech-reports/2017-03.pdf
[1]: https://github.com/ailidani/paxi
[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07000
[3]: https://github.com/gryadka/js