I won't say copilot is completely useless for code. I will say that it's near useless for me. The kind of code that it's good at writing is the kind of code that I can write in my sleep. When I write a for-loop to iterate over an array and print it out (for example), it takes near zero brain power. I'm on autopilot, like driving to work. On the other hand, when I was trialing copilot I'd have to check each suggestion it made to verify that it wasn't giving me garbage. Verifying copilot's suggestions takes a lot more brain power than just writing it myself. And the difference in time is minimal. It doesn't take me much longer to write it myself than it does to validate copilot's work.

Copilot frequently produces results that need to be fixed. Compilers don’t do that. Anyone who uses copilot to generate code without understanding how that code works is a shit developer. The same is true of anyone who copies from stack overflow/etc without understanding what they’re copying.

If a spec tells me I should do something that makes my code less readable in my opinion I am going to ignore the spec every time.

It's not just about learning a language. Given two equivalent languages, writing a project using one or the other is always going to be less work and less of a maintenance burden than writing it using both. A competent manager will take that into account when deciding what tools to use. On top of that, learning a new language has a cost. Of course Rust and JavaScript are not equivalent, but which one is 'better' is highly subjective and dependent on how you measure 'better'. So a manager needs to take that into account. But my fundamental point is that using two languages for a project adds overhead, and learning a language adds overhead, so unless cost (including time) is irrelevant, there must be a compelling reason to choose a dual-language solution* over a single-language solution, and to chose a solution that requires your devs to learn a new language over one that does not. Not to mention switching platforms has a massive cost if your project is already mature. Even if you're creating a new project, if your team already knows JavaScript and doesn't have any particular objection to Electron, there's no compelling reason.

If there is a good reason to learn a language then people will.

Sure. Except in my experience interviewing candidates and from what I've seen online, there are a lot of developers out there who aren't very good. I am not optimistic that the average developer will have an easy time learning a new language. If the "we" in "Is this the electron alternative we've been waiting for" is you and I, that's not a problem. But if OP meant to suggest there will be a large-scale shift away from Electron, then the average developer is quite relevant.

*As someone else pointed out, Dioxus is designed with the intent that you'll right the frontend in Rust, so it's not exactly dual-language like I thought.

I’d stop being awkward if I could but I wouldn’t give up my intense interests. You?

I have 13 followers on GitHub. A few are friends from college, the rest I have absolutely no clue why.

Systems engineering is an established discipline, one you can get a degree in. It’s not just a random term I’m making up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_engineering

I don’t think you really have a choice TBH. Trying to do something like that sounds like a world of pain, and a bunch of unidiomatic code. If you can’t actually support 4 to 10 languages, maybe you should cut back on which ones you support?

To be clear, the SDKs themselves are hand-written; I'm not trying to do anything fancy there. In terms of designing and writing the SDKs, we can manage that for the 4 we have now. The issue is testing. The main system is a collection of services that are accessed via an API. That API can be accessed directly through function calls, or via HTTP or RPC. Our integration tests interact with the system through that API. The SDKs have a moderate amount of logic so they're not simple HTTP/RPC clients, but maintaining multiple (idiomatic) versions of that logic is not too much of a burden. The issue is that I want a single test corpus that I can use to validate each SDK without having to rewrite that test corpus in each language. Ideally I'd like the integration tests to be that test corpus.

If neither of those approaches works, everything speaks C FFI, and Rust is a modern language that would work well for presenting a C FFI that the other languages can use. You’re probably not hot on the idea of rewriting your Go tests into another language, but I think that’s your only real option then.

I was assuming I'd need to rewrite my tests in Go given that Go's FFI support for anything other than C is not somewhere I want to go again. I have been meaning to learn Rust so I might just do that.

There are certainly situations where it would be valuable to be able to place limits on what can be imported, but I can't imagine trying to work with a language that was completely devoid of imports. Because that would mean 100% of your source would have to be in a single file, which sounds absolutely awful for anything but the most trivial applications.

Yes. It is still entirely possible to run VSCode or VSCodium locally without any of that cloud crap.

One of my problems is that I've gotten so practiced at reading code that my standards for "this is readable, it doesn't need much commenting" are much lower than those of the other developers I work with. I've had to recalibrate from "Will I be able to understand this six months from now?" to "Will I need to explain this in the review?"

Code readability is often way more important

This. 100% this. The only thing more important than readability is whether it actually works. If you can't read it, you can't maintain it. The only exception is throw away scripts I'm only going to use a few times. My problem is that what I find readable and what the other developers find readable are not the same.

I’d say, being able to identify bottlenecks is what really matters, because it’s what will eventually lead you to the hot loop you’ll want to optimize.

I love Go. I can modify a program to activate the built-in profiler, or throw the code in a benchmark function and use the tool chain to profile it, then have it render a flame graph that shows me exactly where the CPU is spending its time and/or what calls are allocating. It makes it so easy (most of the time) to identify bottlenecks.