J. Carlos Roldán

I'm taking the Advent of Code again this year. This time, I'm using it as an excuse to dive into Rust. Rust is a modern general-purpose programming language that focuses on performance and type safety. It ensures that the memory pointers are safe without relying on a garbage collector, a key feature contributing to its popularity.

However, the adjective modern is what sounds most interesting to me from all this. Until now, C++ has been my go-to compiled language when I need performance. But, having become accustomed to Python being my default choice for general purpose stuff, returning to C++ feels increasingly tedious.

C++ itself isn't the issue, in fact I think of it as the vanilla flavor of programming languages. It's the surrounding ecosystem that feels outdated: scrolling endlessly through 90's sites from when we used to have long attention spans, every dependency installation that is not just one command line away, every unintuitive build chain… all of this made me look for a fresh compiled language.

Being realistic, one can only excel in so many programming languages. I used to be a fairly good Java programmer, but I barely remember how to read from a file. Which is why I'm taking very seriously this search for a new default compiled language that I can use for the next 10 years without having to worry about the next new kid in the neighborhood.

When looking for alternatives, I started by filtering out the top languages from TIOBE — I know it's not a very scientific source, but it gives a good sense of what languages are at the top — because a language can be as cool as you want, that if I cannot find an easy answer to some obscure error or there are no connectors for a less known database I'd like to use, I'm out. And when looking here, Rust and Go where the only real contenders.

Initially I started using Go, as the syntax looked much simpler. I believe a programmer's efficiency is inversely proportional to how many things they have to remember. With good reason, a language ~64 times slower than C is the #1 simply because syntax is as important as semantics. Just as rookies often focus solely on the former, seasoned programmers sometimes overlook the latter. And in this sense, I decided to ignore Rust because I deemed the syntax as too alien. I mean, this is normal Rust code:

fn main() {
    (1..=5).filter(|&x| x % 2 != 0)
           .for_each(|x| println!("{} is odd", x));
}

However, I'm intrigued about why Rust consistently ranks as the most loved language on the yearly Stack Overflow Survey. I really enjoy coding in Go, how unified all the tooling is and how readable everything ends up being (iota aside), but I'm still not convinced on committing to it for the long term.

Hence, I'll be doing the Advent of Code using Rust with Copilot disabled, to also assess how reliant I've become on AI over the last two years. There is something about the Christmas spirit in doing things the old-fashioned, human way for a change.