The HN comments on this article have been derailed from any interesting discussion about Generics in Go to an utterly pointless religious war about Rust and type systems.
1. This opinion gets expressed on every single comment thread about Go, multiple times. Maybe have some respect for other people's right to have a discussion on a subject without derailing it with a tangential opinion about another language.
2. We all know that Rust is the one true programming language for every possible context. However, because we're clearly idiots, we're writing a program in Go. Pointing out how Rust would do it better isn't helping.
Fitting analogy: If there's an article about McDonald's, people would always talk about Wendy's instead. No one would mention BurgerKing (C++), Subway (D), KFC, ...
PHP must be Taco Bell. It solves a lot of problems quickly, but you'll pay for it later.
I chose my analogy carefully. Coca-Cola tried to change its recipe to make it sweeter because they did studies and found people liked the taste of Pepsi more. So any discussion of changing Coke's flavor means Pepsi is highly relevant. But the converse is not necessarily true. Pepsi doesn't have any (recent) history of trying to match their flavor to Coke.
Maybe a better analogy is this: if Mercedes comes out with an electric car, you should expect to see Tesla in the discussions. But if Tesla comes out with a combustion engine, there's nothing particularly relevant about Mercedes in that discussion.
I'm sure that if there were discussions about adding structural typing or lightweight fibers to Rust, then Go would show up. But most of the discussions tend to be around adding generics or sum types to Go.
I’ve been a long-time user of Haskell, but I can safely say Rust has supplanted it almost entirely for me at this point. I never would have felt comfortable betting on Haskell in a commercial environment. Rust? Absolutely.
If any of these features is of significant value to a programming use case, it is worth talking about rust:
* Speed
* Type safety
* Memory safety
* Memory determinism
* Latency
* RAII-based resource acquisition and destruction
* Concurrency correctness / safety
* Minimal runtime requirements
* Low level bit manipulation (eg. Cryptography, compression)
* Startup time
* Networking
This isn't exhaustive, but it gives a lot of different people in different domains working on different problems a reason to talk about the same language when comparing to their usual choices.
That is context for discussion, and yes, it is relevant. Directly relevant, in fact.
I wanted to hear what Go devs have to say about this latest iteration of the generics proposal. But to do that I have to wade through endless comments about type systems and Rust. Even on comments directly talking about this iteration and how to use it, every other reply starts with "In Rust..."
If implementing generics leads more of the Rust community back to Go, then from what I've seen here: no thanks. I have a feeling we'd see every conversation in every community forum start with "In Rust.."
It's also a great discussion for the go community to have. The only problem here is that it's not a discussion you wanted to have. Should every discussion about go revolve around you and your wants?
If all you wanted was to hear what the go devs wanted to say, you could have clicked on the link and read it. Or could you possibly use the feature that was built for you: the [-] button to collapse a thread. Or maybe, just maybe, you could go to a place that is explicitly only about go, like /r/golang.
But it's every freaking time. Every single time Go is mentioned, there's a ton of Rust folk commenting on how Rust does it (better).
Just for once, it'd be nice to have a comment thread discussing a Go-specific item, that has nothing to do with Rust, without talking about Rust.
And yeah, /r/golang is at least Go-focused. But it has its own problems too. Mostly PHP and JS folks learning Go and asking basic questions (which would be great if they didn't then reply to the answers with "but that's not how PHP/JS does it, why does Go do it so strangely?" and without reading any of the billion answers for that question already).
Sorry if my exasperation is showing ;)
The only cases I know of are people moved to Rust to avoid GC pauses.
If you start talking about changing the recipe for Coca-Cola, surely Pepsi is going to enter the discussion at some point, right?