heappy VS textot.rs

> But, for example, some runtime-related tools (most notably, heap profiling) are just absent — it’s hard to reflect on the runtime of the program if there’s no runtime!

Yeah; I felt that pain too.

I tried to write something to address some parts of the missing space. It's still in the early stages but you may be interested:

https://github.com/mkmik/heappy

I hate to be "that guy" too, but coming from somebody who really likes Rust and is using it more and more (also at $dayjob now) we must admit that Go tooling is one step ahead. CPU profiler, allocation and heap profiler, lock contention profiler. It all comes out of the box.

Yes you have cargo flamegraph for profiling locally and you now have pprof-rs to mimick Go's embedded pprof support. But allocation heap profiling is still something I struggle with.

I saw there was a pprof-rs PR with a heap profiler but there was some doubt as to whether it worked correctly; to get a feeling of how that approach would work but without having to fork pprof-rs I implemented the https://github.com/mkmik/heappy crate which I can use to produce memory allocation flamegraphs (using the same "go tool pprof" tooling!) in real code I run and figure out if it works in practice before pushing it upstream.

But stuff you give for granted like figuring out which structure accounts for most used memory, is very hard to achieve. The servo project uses an internal macro that help you trace the object sizes but it's hard to use outside the servo project.

The GC makes some things very easy, and it's not just about programmers not having to care about memory; it's also that the same reference tracing mechanism used to implement GC can be used to cheaply get profiling information.

I find that's only true so long as the problem you're solving fits well into Go's view of the world.

If you want to make a data structure holding the equivalent of a parametric enum (or tagged union from C), go is very awkward to use compared with richer languages like Swift or Rust. Go is also awkward if you want to implement custom generic data structures.

Eg, this[1] code I wrote a couple years ago for doing text based operational transform became about 1.5x longer in Go compared to rust or typescript because its so awkward to express a parametric enum in go. And it was much harder to read & more buggy as a result. Sadly I lost the go version of the code. I'd be curious if someone with more go experience could do a better job, but I'm skeptical.

Hopefully the situation improves somewhat when generics land.

[1] https://github.com/josephg/textot.rs/blob/03c84b7c35a375ba7d...