“Sustainability with Rust” post misleading about Go
When I first read that, I thought the core conclusions were still mostly correct, but the delta claimed for Rust over Go was too large. Rust will certainly beat Go on this metric (I expect Rust to even beat C and C++ at scale [1]), but by a factor of 3 is probably on the large side.<p>There are other things that I would consider questionable as well; Haskell might be capable of beating Go if you really, <i>really</i> work at it, but what you might call &quot;casually written Haskell&quot; isn&#x27;t going to perform anywhere near as well as casually written Go. And the degree of knowledge required to write high-performance Haskell is much higher than high-performance Go. You have to have more than just knowledge of Haskell as a language, you have to have a fairly deep understanding of exactly how GHC compiles and optimizes it. This can be scaled to the Shootout, but scaling it to real code is very difficult.<p>Still, I think the general point is well-taken. I&#x27;m less worried about the environmental impact of my code because my code runs at scales where even if my code was running for &quot;free&quot; from an environmental impact, it wouldn&#x27;t save much of anything. But having used Go for a while, I&#x27;d have a really difficult time moving back to a language that is literally dozens of times slower, and, yes, consumes dozens of times more energy as a result. Part of the reason <i>why</i> my code runs at such small scales is that it&#x27;s reasonably efficient code. I have a couple of services that I consider trivial, but if I were writing them in Python, would be non-trivial. Still not exactly monsters that would be eating clusters of machines at a time, but there&#x27;s still a lot of practical operational difference between &quot;This occasionally spikes to 25% of a CPU for a minute at high loads&quot; and &quot;This occasionally spikes to consuming 10 full CPUs for a minute at high load&quot;, and that&#x27;s a fairly reasonable multiplier. I have several services that would have deltas like that.<p>[1]: A previous comment of mine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25625362" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25625362</a>