The highest quality codebase

The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go. It's like all the codebases in COBOL. Maybe COBOL at that time was the best language for the product, but now, it's not that easy to find someone with the knowledge to maintain the system. As soon as you make a choice, you accept that further down the line, there will be some X cost to keep going in that direction and some Y cost to revert. As a technical lead, more often you need to ensure that X or/and Y don't grow to be enormous.

> The impact is that now, if you want to modify the project in some way, you will need to learn Go.

That's tautologically true, yes, but your claim was

> Either you know the problem domain and can argue about which solution is better and why. Or you don't and what you're doing are experiment to learn the domain.

So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why? Remember, this is objective fact, not art, so no personal preferences are allowed.

Neither. Because the solution for IaC is not Go or Rust, just like the solution for composing music is not a piano or a violin.

A solution may be Terraform, another is Ansible,… To implement that solution, you need a programming language, but by then you’re solving accidental complexity, not the essential one attached to the domain. You may be solving, implementation speed, hiring costs, code safety,… but you’re not solving IaC.

> So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-as-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why? Remember, this is objective fact, not art, so no personal preferences are allowed.

I think it’s possible to engage with questions like these head on and try to find an answer.

The problem is that if you want the answer to be close to accurate, you might need both a lot of input data about the situation (including who’d be working with and maintaining the software, what are their skills and weaknesses; alongside the business concerns that impact the timeline, the scale at which you’re working with and a 1000 other things), as well as the output of concrete suggestions might be a flowchart so big it’d make people question their sanity.

It’s not impossible, just impractical with a high likelihood of being wrong due to bad or insufficient data or interpretation.

But to humor the question: as an example, if you have a small to mid size team with run of the mill devs that have some traditional OOP experience and have a small to mid infrastructure size and complexity, but also have relatively strict deadlines, limited budget and only average requirements in regards to long term maintainability and correctness (nobody will die if the software doesn’t work correctly every single time), then Go will be closer to an optimal choice.

I know that because I built an environment management solution in Go, trying to do that in Rust in the same set of circumstances wouldn’t have been successful, objectively speaking. I just straight up wouldn’t have iterated fast enough to ship. Of course, I can only give such a concrete answer for that very specific set of example circumstances after the fact. But even initially those factors pushed me towards Go.

If you pull any number of levers in a different direction (higher correctness requirements, higher performance requirements, different team composition), then all of those can influence the outcome towards Rust. Obviously every detail about what a specific system must do also influences that.

> Neither.

> A solution may be Terraform

They're asking about what language you use to write Terraform.

It's not accidental complexity, it's what the question is about.

> It’s not impossible, just impractical with a high likelihood of being wrong due to bad or insufficient data or interpretation.

If it's impractical to know, why is using personal preference and intuition a "huge red flag"?

That's the core idea being disagreed with, not the idea that you could theoretically with enough resources get an objective answer.

It might be because depending on one's sensitivity to various factors and how much work they put into discovering the domain, things might feel okay, and yet be the completely wrong choice.

For example, how to many people MongoDB felt like a really good option during its hype cycle before it became clear how there are workloads out there, where you will get burnt badly if you pick anything other than a traditional RDBMS with ACID.

Similarly, there are cases where people cargo cult really hard or just become opinionated over time - someone who has worked primarily in Java for 20 years will probably pick that for a wide variety of projects, though this preference might make them blind to the fact that others aren't as good with it on a given team and that they might not iterate fast enough to ship, when compared with, let's say Django or Ruby on Rails or even Laravel.

Feelings can be dangerous, informed choices will generally be better, though I guess with the way we use language, those two kinda blend together. If those feelings are based on good enough data and experience, then those might be pretty valuable too - someone who has been writing code for 20 years will probably be more accurate than someone who has been programming for 2 years, yet if someone has 10x2 years of experience (doing the same thing, not learning, not exploring), then it's a toss up, worse yet if people think that still means seniority.

I kinda get why someone might react to the word "feels" in seemingly deterministic development context, but my own reaction wouldn't be so strong and with certain people, I'd trust their feelings. At the same time I've seen plenty of people who write what they believe to be a good code that is a bit of a mess in my eyes.

It’s very much accidental complexity. As the sibling comment to my previous comment said, the choice of a language does not depend on Terraform design, but on contextual information like the team skill, business requirements like time delivery and implementation correctness. None of which really impacts the design of Terraform as a solution. Just like SMTP or Posix tools does not care about the language.

If you're talking about the topic, it's not accidental, it's mandatory, because you have to write Terraform in something.

The topic is not how you use Terraform or at a high level design its features, it's how you implement Terraform with code.

> the choice of a language does not depend on Terraform design, but on contextual information like the team skill, business requirements like time delivery and implementation correctness

That doesn't make it accidental to the topic. It may be accidental to a different topic (the design of Terraform?) that nobody was discussing, but it's not accidental to this topic (language choice).

That list of factors is how you get closer to making the decision.

>> So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why?

This was the question. And my answer was that Go or Rust have no relevancy in the IaC domain. Ansible is relevant, but Python is not. Chef is relevant, Ruby is not. And I’m pretty sure there are in-house stuff that are just Perl scripts.

The goal is solving some problem in IaC, by the time, you are considering language choice, you’ve already left the domain and are looking at implementation problems where each choice is balancing tradeoffs.

Context. That wasn't the original question. That's a short restatement of the real question which is up in an earlier post:

>> Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated.

> I really don't think this is true. What was the demonstrated impact of writing Terraform in Go rather than Rust? Would writing Terraform in Rust have resulted in a better product? Would rewriting it now result in a better product? Even among engineers with 15 years experience you're going to get differing answers on this.

And I’ve already answered that question. One of the main impact is that if you want a contributor to the codebase, the person have to learn Go. Even if they have good knowledge of the domain and are proficient in Rust. There would be some cost associated to training that person in Go (it may be small).

Rewriting from Go to another language wouldn’t solve the problem better. Because Go is an implementation choice, not a design choice. There’s nothing in Go that make Terraform better. It could be in C and a lot of people wouldn’t notice.

> And I’ve already answered that question.

You somewhat answered it in a way that doesn't really get to why they asked it (you can't make every decision based on "demonstrated impact").

But you did that in a different comment than the one I replied to. The one I replied to was just answering the wrong question entirely. Which is why I replied.

> Rewriting from Go to another language wouldn’t solve the problem better. Because Go is an implementation choice, not a design choice. There’s nothing in Go that make Terraform better. It could be in C and a lot of people wouldn’t notice.

I'm sorry, are you arguing that using feel to decide how to structure a piece of code is a "huge red flag", but the choice of entire programming language is unimportant?