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Has the market spoken? Time to pick up Golang and Rust?

by simplecto on 11/7/24, 4:53 PM with 63 comments

• by otikik on 11/7/24, 5:07 PM

  One good thing about the Javascript ecosystem: if you don't like it, you only need to wait 6 months for it to have changed completely!

• by tail_exchange on 11/7/24, 5:08 PM

  Going from Python to Go was very easy for me, and I do feel much more productive. I don't want to work with Python ever again.

  Rust is a beast though, I tried picking it up several times, but lose interest quickly. The language is interesting, but the learning curve is a problem.

• by bryanlarsen on 11/7/24, 5:15 PM

  My advice would be to learn Rust only if you feel you would enjoy working in Rust and/or enjoy solving the types of problems that Rust is good at. I love working in Rust, but it's not for everybody and without intrinsic motivation you're probably going to bounce off of it.

• by bbor on 11/7/24, 5:22 PM

  Well I’d encourage you to follow your dreams/preferences and adjust your spending accordingly, especially now that the recent mini-shock reminded us that absurd salaries can’t always be the norm, but;

  IEEE puts out an incredible report on this stuff every year: https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2024

  The boring answer based on current demand is that the old languages are still dominant. Of the new languages Rust and Go are indeed at the top, but they’re still ~below C++/C, Java, and C#. OTOH, they are definitely near the top of growing languages, which is probably where your sense of them being “chosen” comes from; if you’re cynically trying to maximize long term career earnings, IMO either would be worth some investment.

  The elephant in the room is, as you briefly mentioned, Python and its relation to the AI boom. There’s lots of fantastic shovels being made in other languages (eg llama-cpp), but the huge majority of new libraries are written with python APIs in mind (eg VLLM, Langchain, BentoML, and ofc the classics like PyTorch/Keras, SciKit, and numpy/pandas). Again, speaking cynically, I think there’s a lot of money flying around the python space right now.

  Finally, I think it’s worth mentioning my take on the old refrain: languages aren’t really that different so don’t stress about it, but it can be worth it to invest in new paradigms/spaces/application types. It sounds like you’re not a fan of webdev, but instead of hyper focusing on picking a language, maybe consider picking new spaces to explore! I mentioned LLM shovels (aka quantizers, inference platforms) above, but there’s also some other booming spaces such as CRDTs/LocalFirst and spatial computing, to name my two faves.

  Best of luck! Exciting time to be a member of the puzzle-solving class :)

• by runjake on 11/7/24, 5:19 PM

  Anecdotal, but I spent 4 hours learning Go and then started on a fairly large non-trivial project later that day.

  That kinda sold me on Go.

• by OptionOfT on 11/7/24, 5:46 PM

  In my spare time I started to learn Rust, and it has been great for me. While I think the language is great for many things, the largest problem is the learning curve.

  So that means it's very hard to introduce in a company where the focus is on getting code out there as cheap as possible. Especially when the majority of work is done by contractors which in general aren't hired to learn new stuff, but more to execute work with existing skills.

  Personally, once I became proficient enough in Rust my way of programming changed, and this actually became an issue when having to write other languages. Learning to write Rust actually increased my cognitive load when writing other languages, as I am constantly worried about not having my safety net.

• by ebiester on 11/7/24, 5:22 PM

  You have management experience. Your competitive advantage isn't your stack: it's your ability to understand context. There will be plenty of jobs in anything in the top 10: apply to all of them and if you get a bite, learn enough of that language to pass basic problems.

• by Eumenes on 11/7/24, 5:23 PM

  This is easy to verify: go to Indeed.com and see how many Rust vs Django vs Golang jobs are posted. Do the same on LinkedIn or Stack Overflow jobs. Django + React with solid SQL skills is the best most marketable skillset in the US. Rust is out there but its mostly small startups ... growing companies shouldn't pick stacks that aren't popular if they want to hire alot of devs.

• by nelup20 on 11/7/24, 5:26 PM

  I guess it depends on the area, but I thought Rust jobs were still hard to come by even today?

  For jobs, ecosystem and general productivity my go-to is always Java/C#/Go, if you learn one of those I think you'll be set, so Go in your case. The learning curve for Rust is similar to C++, much steeper.

• by brodouevencode on 11/7/24, 4:55 PM

  I found it pretty easy to go from Python to Golang. I'm still learning Rust, and finding it to be much more sophisticated that Python and Golang.

• by recoup4307 on 11/7/24, 5:21 PM

  I love Rust and I’ve watching the market for years too. Whenever I look, it seems to me that most Rust jobs are still in the crypto area, with a few more systems programming popping up recently if that’s your area.

  Even though I’m already very productive in Rust for typical microservice backend scenarios, none of those jobs are close to my areas of expertise.

  So I wonder if Rust jobs go unfulfilled not because of lack of rust developers but because the job market doesn’t match the reasons why some developers learn Rust in the first instance.

• by ActorNightly on 11/7/24, 7:05 PM

  Python has recently taken over as the top language on Github.

• by devjab on 11/9/24, 1:15 PM

  We’ve been a pretty solid TS, C#, C and C# shop which was in the process of moving some TS and all of our C# to Go to make our language package smaller. Go was a good choice for us, it’s not better than C# in any way. Then we had some organisation wise changes in strategy, and now Python is our strategy. (Still with C (sometimes Zig), and TS in our single frontend. Anyway this meant I recently had to do my first work with Django and boy was that… well I guess it was my Ruby on Rails moment? It’s so productive… Sure, it’s setup like a Go project more than a Django project, we use Django apps more like Go modules and we’ve opted for ninja-Django for the API, so it’s not exactly Django. It’s still really easy to be productive with, however, and now I’m not sure why I haven’t crossed paths with it before.

  That being said, it’s very easy to get into Go if you know Python. Especially coming from an opinionated framework like Django. In my experience the people who have the hardest time getting into go are Java/C# developers who don’t appreciate the core Go focus on simplicity and having absolutely no “magic”. Which is understandable. Getting into Go from Python is different because Python is terrible, so a lot of the opinionated simplicity will most likely make you wish Python had parts of it.

  We did some PoCs with Rust to see if it was worth adopting instead of C. We found it wasn’t for us. I mentioned Zig, that is because of the interoperability with C, it’s not something we plan on fully adopting any time soon.

  As far as “future proofing” goes, does it really matter? If you’ve been a developer for years you’ll easily be capable of picking up Go and Rust. Of the two I personally found Go a little more challenging to be effective with. It’s easier to get into, but getting concurrency right (not being a memory hog) wasn’t trivial for us in the beginning. You should also look at your local job market. I think PHP would be the best fit for a “mercenary” in my city. By comparison I don’t think there has been a single Rust job posting for a couple of years.

• by jondwillis on 11/11/24, 7:24 PM

  Another language that I have categorized as a peer of Go and Rust is Swift. Aside from being Apple-centric, and having a bit of mismanagement/bloat in its recent technical history, can be a very productive, safe, and ergonomic language. It can be run outside of Apple OSes, though YMMV, since many libraries assume that Apple frameworks are available.

• by anonzzzies on 11/7/24, 5:28 PM

  Not sure why people focus on their stack still. Just build stuff with what you know (and like). Everything is fast enough, scales enough. Just maybe you cannot find people if you grow for some choices, however, if you don't grow enough (chances are you won't anyway), it can be an example; we don't interview js stack or python stack people because everyone is that, so there is mostly terrible quality. If someone applies for Haskell or Common Lisp, it's generally just automatically good and often excellent even.

• by tmpz22 on 11/7/24, 5:21 PM

  As you know from management, it depends on what you are optimizing for.

  Are you looking for the programming language with the greatest number of available jobs?

  Are you looking for employment at a language-fluent organization like FANNG?

  Are you trying to prematurely optimize for future relevance?

  Are you looking for the highest paid programming roles with niche specialization in a specific language?

  Are you trying to develop for a particular platform (iOS/Desktop/Browser/Server)?

• by cschep on 11/7/24, 5:14 PM

  "it seems many Rust and Golang positions go unfilled."

  I was under the impression that everyone wanted a job writing Rust, but had to settle for making React components. Point me to these unfulfilled Go jobs please. :)

• by rob on 11/7/24, 5:21 PM

  Pick them up for what? Web development? I'd pick up PHP instead if you need a job.

• by dangoodmanUT on 11/7/24, 5:27 PM

  Rust definitely is harder to pick up. I’ve been working on my rust, and on paper I’d like to use rust for everything, but I can move 10x faster in go for far less than 10x the runtime overhead

• by sandreas on 11/7/24, 5:53 PM

  Learning something just to get a job takes the fun away and what is it worth then?

  I'd recommend to maybe start with something fun, like doing some game development maybe with wasm...

• by vivzkestrel on 11/7/24, 5:57 PM

  usually when you ask people "golang vs rust" they would say "it depends..." so let me ask you golang vs rust for a very specific use case "building a trading terminal that displays orderbooks, bids, asks, spread etc from multiple exchanges" what kinda backend would you choose for this? golang or rust? and especially if this has to work in a web server environment?

• by fnord77 on 11/8/24, 2:17 AM

  Java has finally gotten pretty good and it will get even better when Valhalla / value types gets out of preview.

  Still demand.

• by krapp on 11/7/24, 7:04 PM

  If all you care about is income, focus on C, C++ and COBOL. Those jobs are probably never going away.

• by konschubert on 11/7/24, 5:23 PM

  You write well :)

• by bedobi on 11/7/24, 5:22 PM

  In Golang, you have to learn to be dumb, because that's explicitly and deliberately what the designer said about the intended users of the language and how it's designed.

• by Saphyel on 11/7/24, 5:21 PM

  I see a lot of Rust projects in the market, a lot of projects done and integrated in other languages (pydantic, ruff, etc...)

  From Go I only saw a promotion in Google ? now is finally abandoned?