Go is like that abusive partner that gives you flowers and the next day makes you feel like shit. Then another day you go to an expensive restaurant and you tell yourself that maybe it’s not so bad and they still care. And the cycle continues.
Rust is an autistic partner that sometimes struggles with telling you how much they care, is often overly pedantic about technical correctness and easily gets sidetracked by details, but with some genuine effort from both sides it’s very much a workable relationship.
With some sprinkle of libraries such as anyhow and thiserror the Rust errors become actually pleasant to use. The vanilla way is indeed painful when you start handling more than one type of error at a time.
Exactly this. Anyhow makes error handling in rust actually a joy. It’s only something you need to consider if you’re writing a library for others to use, and in that case, it’s good that rust forces you to be very very explicit
<span style="color:#323232;">const ret = try do_thing();
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">if( ret ) | result | {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> do_something_with_result(result);
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>
The try keyword returns any error up; the if-unwrap works with what came out of a successful call. Normally you wouldn’t have both, of course.
do_thing would be defined as a union of an error (a distinct kind of type, so it can be reasoned about with try, catch and unwrapping) and the wrapped return value.
I actually reasonably like Go. It’s simple and pragmatic but I fucking loathe its error handling. To me it just replicates one of the worst features of C
I think I’d rather code in Go than Rust. But I’m not a great Rust programmer so my opinion may not count. I can code effectively in C, C++, Go, Java, C#, Python, and a few others, but Rust is the only language that I find hard to use. I’m probably just dumb
Yes, I was using Rustrover the last time I used Rust. VSCode previously. I’ve tried to get into Rust a few times and really just failed repeatedly. Ill probably try again at some point but my experience thus far hasn’t been great
You’re not dumb. Rust is a hard language to pick. Some people probably think I’m mocking it because I made this meme but I’m really not - I love Rust. I’m mocking us mere humans trying to cope with greatness 🤣And I’m looking forward to the time when I finally “graduate” and become more productive and experienced with Rust.
Asked it for the official documentation, got a link to the /current/ documentation's chapter on operators. Then asked for the heading about the IN operator and it gave me all four of the numbers. No need to wade through outdated or irrelevant results.
Eh I mean alphabet and Google do have legitimate reasons for antitrust lawsuits, but that’s independent of how shit Google search has become.
Anyway, for those who are fed up with the terrible results, use Ecosia. I’ve basically never needed to use anything else and the advertising money goes towards planting trees responsibly to rebuild ecosystems.
Anti-trust is not about seeking perfection, it’s a defense against abuses of power. That’s a good thing unless you like to be abused by the powerful, in which case lick some more boots.
I don’t mean to sour the funny, because it is funny/sad indeed, but
If you know you want the info from the official docs, why not do a search that forces results from that site, or search just for the official docs and then find the page you’re after on the docs themselves?
To be fair, back in the day you could get better results by relying on Google with site:foobar and the Boolean/"power user" stuff. A lot of built-in search boxes on sites were a bit dodgy, or at least less flexible than AND/OR/NOT and other "power user tricks".
Of course, these days those seem to be ignored wholesale and even "verbatim quotes" are an utter crapshoot, this was back when Google didn't fucking blow.
Nowadays I’m pretty sure stuff like site: foobar still works no? Idk I use ddg so I can’t say with certainty but I feel like “basic” power user stuff should still work right?
"site" does work still, I think, just plus a lot of irrelevant drivel - standard Google fare, you see it on Youtube too.
I'd consider the most basic case to be, specifically, the "quotes for verbatim results", which definitely do not work anymore. Neither does + for a positively (hue hue) required term, a close second.
Interestingly, bing of all things turns up better results than Google with the same search terms, first 3 blocks are “popular results”, first is tutorial sites, second is w3 schools and third takes you to the current docs for functions and operators.
If you ignore those, the fourth result takes you to the current docs for comparison functions and operators. I’d prefer it taking you right to the official docs on the first result, but comparatively acceptable. It was memed to death but I’ve seriously found it more useful than Google these days, comparable to ddg’s results.
If you’re going through that route, SearX beats everything and it’s not even close. It’s self hosted and takes search results from any engine you check in a config, different config for search categories, … Rn I’m mostly getting results from brave, qwant, and duckduck. Gotta acknowledge the bing copilot tho, it’s pretty decent, but requires to use edge or bing app in android, so i only use it when I’m lazy or I’m searching for something too obscure for searx.
I’ve used Bing for a few years for the free rewards points and purchase rebates, and it has worked very well for me when it comes to normal searches including searches for software development. I very rarely have to turn to Google when trying to look something up, and as you mentioned, sometimes Google honestly gives me worse results. I will say however that I have found the image and video search on Bing to be significantly worse than Google’s (which I already have some issues with). Not sure about the other search types like shopping or news since I never use them.
I have a half thought that maybe bing works well for technical searches because it’s the default search engine for edge and depending on the company, you may or may not be able to use a different browser and I’ll be real, I tend to leave my work laptop setting as default as possible unless particularly awful.
i read something a few years ago, that it was better, because bing don’t have many users, so they couldn’t rely on AI, and because everyone was using google, sites didn’t optimize for bing SEO, not sure how much time it has, with microsoft obsession with AI
We currently have a student for training and had her learn Rust. After two weeks or so, she told me that she had a really hard time finding anything about Rust, and it became clear that she was really confused and thought Rust was some fringe technology that no one uses.
And yeah, no, search engines just got obliterated by LLM spam since the last time she had to learn a new technology. Seriously, I remember getting better results about Rust back in 2018, when it was really still relatively fringe…
But then you need to know enough about the topic already to know what is stable and what changes with newer versions.
Like, the “web dev boot camp” course I got from UDemy a few years ago as a guide for building a web dev high school course: I recently went back to to look something up, and the whole thing has been completely redone start to finish. Makes sense, considering that it’s updated to the newest versions of Bootstrap and other libraries (and who knows what else).
I know nothing about Rust, but I would assume there are at least some libraries that have major new versions in the last couple of years which might change best practices somehow? idk. But the harder part is not knowing what you don’t know.
One search that was memorable to me was looking for dimensional information on a T-slot. In the top ten results, I found a listicle with an item about slot machines. LLM spam and Google’s relentless bullshit have poisoned the internet.
I’ve been into computers for over 20 years and I couldn’t tell you what uses rust. I am aware of it, but I am completely unaware of how narrow or broadly it is used. I keep forgetting people aren’t talking about the game.
I mean, to name a few projects off the top of my head:
Firefox
Android is migrating some of their internals.
The Linux kernel, Google Chrome, Thunderbird are preparing to use Rust.
Many Python programs now have Rust in there, because of the PyCrypto library.
Fish shell is in the middle of a RiiR.
I don’t feel like there’s a ton of big, mature projects yet, because of how relatively young Rust still is, but performance-critical or embedded software will be strongly considering Rust in the future.
And like C, Rust can be used to create libraries which can be called from practically any other programming language. I expect that to give it significant growth in the future.
Frankly, I do most of my searching these days directly on std.rs and docs.rs . But yeah, those are usually better as a reference than for learning.
You can look through lib.rs and awesome-rust.com , if you’re searching for a specific library.
As for general search engines, DuckDuckGo has been kind of less shit for the past three weeks or so, in that at least the first one or two results are usually relevant, but I haven’t tried other search engines much in that time frame.
Another tip is to make use Clippy. Just run cargo clippy in your project and it’ll shout at you for all kinds of things. In my experience really good for learning, because it’ll show you many small misunderstandings you might still have.
Been there. Done that. FML on searching for programming help some days. Versioning is a nightmare as the way you “used” to do things is no longer relevant and the rest of the results are some asshole saying it is a duplicate question that was answered 10 years ago…that is no longer fucking relevant!
Sorry. Yesterday sucked. I hope today is less frustration and more things working like they are supposed to.
As someone who is trying to teach themselves a few new things this year by diving to projects using them… I seriously, seriously feel you. It honestly makes me question whether I should just abandon each project I start, both professional and personal.
All the relevant hits are from years and/or 2+ versions of whatever ago or forum posts with dead links to an alleged solution.
I feel like in the past I could just dive into something and search my way through it. Now I feel like that era is over and I question whether it’s me, my niche project idea, the disappearing community, or just the search engines.
Oh, that stuff happens all the time. The one that really pissed me off was Microsoft 404-ing basically their entire KB system.
That thing was standing for so long you could still find Windows 9x stuff on it, and it was glorious.
Around the time they stopped supporting windows 7, they bricked the entire thing up and started a new system. Overnight, all the Microsoft help article links went dead. Find a good forum post about an issue that you’re having and someone replied with a link to the MS KB saying little more than “this should work” followed by a sea of commenters saying thanks, that worked, but when you follow the link, it goes nowhere.
And right before they did that, they started removing footnotes from KB articles that only dealt with older OSes, so if you ever needed to go back and find something, it just wasn’t there anymore. For example certain RGB packing formats were only supported on newer OSes and the footnote used to tell you that, but then it disappeared. I have been directly affected by that multiple times.
I wonder if the internet archive has a full copy of the KBs from before Microsoft dumped them. I’d love to set those up in a web server so I can reference them as needed.
It doesn’t matter. List all the crap you want, but show me the most up to date official documentation for the postgres “IN” operator in the very first result! It can’t be that hard.
Go really does do well in the zero-to-hero case, that’s for certain. Unfortunately it doesn’t fare nearly as well in terms of ease when it comes to continued development.
Go has a heavy focus on simplicity and ease-of-use by hiding away complexity through abstractions, something that makes it an excellent language for getting to the minimum-viable-product point. Which I definitely applaud it for, it can be a true joy to code an initial implementation in it.
The issue with hiding complexity like such is when you reach the limit of the provided abstractions, something that will inevitably happen when your project reaches a certain size. For many languages (like C/C++, Ruby, Python, etc) there’s an option to - at that point - skip the abstractions and instead code directly against the underlying layers, but Go doesn’t actually have that option.
One result of this is that many enterprise-sized Go projects have had to - in pure desperation - hire the people who designed Go in the first place, just to get the necessary expertice to be able to continue development.
Ananace and the article they linked are using their dislike of Go to conclude that it’s a bad language*. It is not a bad language. Every language has hidden complexity and foot guns. They don’t like Go. Maybe you won’t like Go. That’s ok. But that doesn’t make Go a bad language. The language designers are very opinionated and you might dislike them and their decisions.
I haven’t used Rust but from what I’ve seen, it’s a lot less readable than Go. And the only thing more important than readability is whether or not the code does what it’s supposed to do. For that reason I doubt I’ll ever use Rust outside of specific circumstances.
*I’m using “a bad language” as shorthand for “a language you shouldn’t use”. Maybe they don’t think it’s bad but amounts to the same thing.
Another reason is kind of a general thing with programming language design: Go, like Java or C, has relatively few concepts in the language and stdlib. This means you’re relatively quick to have seen all of them.
But this also means that for various tasks, these concepts that were left out, would have been the right tool. For example, Go doesn’t have enums.
Generally, it’s still possible to create all possible programs, because of turing-completeness, but it will be more cumbersome and more boilerplate-heavy.
So, as a rule of thumb, the more concepts are provided by the language and stdlib, the more you have to learn upfront, but the less pain you have long-term.
Is there a language that anyone would say really does fare well for continued development or is it just that few people enjoy maintaining code? I’ve maintained some pretty old Go programs I wrote and didn’t mind it at all. I’ve inherited some brand new ones and wanted to rage quit immediately. I’ve also hated my own code too, so it’s not just whether or not I wrote it.
I have found maintainability is vastly more about the abstractions and architecture (modules and cohesive design etc) chosen than it is about the language.
Rust is extremely geared toward maintainability at the cost of other values such as learnability and iteration speed. Whether it’s successful is of course somewhat a matter of opinion (at least until we figure out how to do good quantitative studies on software maintainability), and it is of course possible to write brittle Rust code. But it does make a lot of common errors (including ones Go facilitates) hard or impossible to replicate.
It also strongly pushes toward specific types of abstractions and architectural decisions, which is pretty unique among mainstream languages, and is of course a large part of what critics dislike about it (since that’s extremely limiting compared to the freedom most languages give you). But the ability for the compiler to influence the high-level design and code organization is a large part of what makes Rust uniquely maintainability-focused, at least in theory.
If I’m going to inherit a large code base to maintain, I’d like Java, C# the most, Python, the least. Go isnt too bad IMO. I’ve not worked with enough Rust code to really judge it. BTW I like Python but lack of types makes refactoring and discoverability harder
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