Gopher vs Crab

Having a bit of an existential crisis (not really). I wrote a bunch of personal apps in Rust as part of a collection called Andromeda. Rust seemed like a good choice at the time; it satisfied the low memory consumption that I wanted on my home server. The feedback loop of the compiler was great.

However, today I started thinking (dangerous stuff), and there are two things I can’t shake:

Readability

Let’s be honest: Rust looks… rough. It’s not intuitive, and I don’t like that. I want to read the code and know what it does. In the moment this is doable, but coming back to it after a while is not great.

Dependencies

Doing anything in Rust usually requires downloading a huge number of crates/dependencies. While Creates ecosystem seems pretty solid, I don’t think it would take much for it to succumb to a supply chain attack. It’s not NPM for sure, but it could be.

All of this has me wondering if Go might be a better choice. It has a much more robust standard library that can handle most of my needs, which will greatly reduce my dependencies. I’ve got way more experience writing go and it just looks so much better.

Just for fun I used Pi + GPT 5.4 to rewrite feeds in Go. The memory consumption was about the same if not lower than the Rust companion. It worked right out of the box. My apps are so simple that I’m less convinced I need Rust for these.

Perhaps, just maybe, I will embrace the Gopher.