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The future of back-end development
(lemm.ee)
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I’m surprised no one has mentioned golang. We have the usual dichotomy of java and rust but there’s a very very good option for those who are worried about rust adoption.
I vastly prefer writing rust code but go on its own gets you very very similar performance at the cost of developer experience. I think sum types are the #1 requested feature so once that comes I’ll be a much happier boy.
I think Golang had the potential to take over just because it's so easy to pick up and start contributing.
My last position was Golang focused and our hiring was never focused on experience with the language because we knew that if you understood programming concepts you would succeed in Golang.
Today, I'm working on Rust and while I enjoy it for what I'm using it for (Systems level instead of Web Services) I'd be hesitant to suggest it for most backend application just due to the ramp up time for new developers.
tl;Dr Golang will have an easier time hiring for because no language specific experience is required.
I would probably suggest Rust for that exact reason, you'll have to fight the language a little bit at the beginning (at least if you'll have a very "interior mutable" experience instead of a functional background), but it teaches you how to write your code in a nicely relatively uniform compositional safe style, that IMHO can be read quite well between different people (team) and I think is easier to review (as long as it's not some super magic trait-heavy/proc-macro code of course, but I think for actual applications (vs libraries) that part will be rather low)
Also I think nowadays the barrier into the language is much lower than it was a few years ago. The tooling, specifically rust-analyzer (and probably Intellij Rust too, never tried it though) and the compiler itself got really good in the meantime (I actually think Rust-analyzer is by now the best LSP for any language I know of), so that getting into Rust is likely not that hard anymore (you'll have to learn/understand a few concepts though, like heap/stack and the lifetime system, but I think that it's not that hard to learn).
Go just often feels very hacky to write with a lot of quirky things like handling errors, and a lot of missing features like pattern matching or a relatively good type system, I don't think it really promotes that nice architectures (or limits the programmer kinda).