Please ELI5, I lost track. I used to learn a bit of C and a bit of Python a few years ago but never really went deeper into programming. And now suddenly it seems that a host of new programming languages have appeared and that stuff that used to work fine in whatever old language it was in is now rewritten in a new language.

How do languages like Golang and Rust differ from older languages (these two have probably been around a while but for me they feel ‘new’)? Why are we coming up with new languages all the time? Besides those two, what other languages are there worth knowing about? Is it worth learning them? Are they going to come up with yet another one next week? (I know, many questions, an invitation to infodump I guess …)

  • Pieisawesome@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    55·
    8 days ago

    Golang is 16 years old and rust is 14 years old.

    Why do people use them? Why do developers prefer C or Python? Because they like them.

    Go has a good niche of native + performance for systems programming. It’s still more abstract than C, but much less than Python. It’s a good middle ground. It’s not JIT like C# or Java.

    Rust is just as fast as C, allows lower level programming that you could do with C. Rusts big advantage is that its memory safe (unless you use unsafe). That eliminates a very common C bug.

    • nous@programming.devEnglish
      33·
      8 days ago

      Rusts big advantage is that its memory safe

      Most languages are memory safe. It’s only really C, C++ and zig that are not (at least for more mainstream languages). Rust is special as it is memory safe without a garbage collector. Which is big for domains where the overhead of a GC is unacceptable.