Go's interface{} gets heavy criticism, a lot of it deservingly too, but this is one area where I think Go works really well. You can have a standard API structure and use that across multiple domains.
I really do need to give Rust a try though. I'd been holding back because my impressions of it was the core libraries were still in flux so code that compiled today might fail 2 months down the line. Is this still the case now?
Right, but I think when they say "core libraries" they probably mean things like hyper, which are still unstable (though getting closer to stability). That said, a lot of big rust crates have stabilized in the last few months.
I believe you, but at the same time it's an issue every time I go to use it. I want to use this crate, it has a feature flag and now I'm on nightly.
Now, I'm willing to use the bleeding edge, since I'm just just learning the language, but it still just bugs me in that way that code smells always do.
Like I said, much of the criticism against interface{} is deserving, but genuinely it works really well for passing generic APIs like Reader / Writer.
The way how interface{} works there is you actually write your own named structure that is bootstrapped by interface{} rather than dealing with interface{} as a generic type that needs casting. So what you're actually working with is an io.Reader / io.Writer structure but which can be transferred to any domain providing your specific implementation of Reader / Writer supports the same methods (since it's the methods that define the interface you avoid all the horrible hacks than normally trouble interface{}). This means you can transfer data from a gzip archive to a base64 encoder or JSON marshaller to a OS STD* file or network device all as if they were the same logical interface and without having to write a lot of additional layers encoding / decoding the data nor describing the interface. It all works surprisingly painlessly. In fact it's literally the only time when working with interface{} that the process isn't painful.
So it's going nothing to do with fanboyism nor stockholm syndrome, interface{} just behaves quite differently to it's usual behavior and works really well in this specific situation in my personal opinion. If the Go developers left interface{} there instead of using it as a hacky alternative to generics then I doubt there would be the same backlash against it. But sadly they didn't.
I really do need to give Rust a try though. I'd been holding back because my impressions of it was the core libraries were still in flux so code that compiled today might fail 2 months down the line. Is this still the case now?