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Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

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Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#1
What I like:

- Ecosystem. Very easy to install and use libraries.

- Can compile programs to single executables easily.

- Easy to work with (Very productive) while also running fast.

What I disliked:

- The syntax but I'm starting to like it. (It seems that Go's syntax is an acquired taste for me)

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#3
The quality of the standard library, especially net, time, and to a lesser extent, strings.

The tooling, including the built-in testing package and test tool, and go doc. Also vet and fmt, if for no other reason than it precludes most arguments over braces and tabs vs spaces. I don't have cause to use it much, but pprof is a dream.

I like the idea of the go module system, and the fact that dependency management is part of the language ecosystem. It's still a bit clunky, especially if you end up, like I did, stuck with a system that has lots of libraries with poorly-thought out dependency relationships.

interfaces, especially single-method ones. But also the fact that your code doesn't have to declare it's implementing an interface, and has no dependencies on the interface declaration itself.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#5

Not too many complaints. I like it much better than Java backend. Go and Typescript are now my go to for everything I think.

curious if you prefer Typescript or Go for backend development. My friend group told me they prefer Typescript because of shared code with client and ease of hiring.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#7
For me Go is unique in that it can produce a fully static binary that can fetch from a HTTPS endpoint. It also supports many architectures. On top of that the package system and it's just way more convenient to use than other languages. Easy to learn, easy to put somewhere in practice.

Not every program has to be 100% safe and delivering 2M req/s. Sometimes you just want to build a program once and ship it.

What other language has that? Go isn't perfect though. It's startup sequence is long, the API towards C (and other languages) is quite bad, and if you build a fibonacci program and compare it with C it's 3x slower despite requiring no allocations whatsoever.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#8
1. Static linking. I'm astonished by how many languages expect the end user to install dependencies/runtime themselves, and something about it feels very impure.

2. The "go" keyword (and the whole goroutine system underneath it). Threads are clunky, somewhat unportable and generally unscalable. Goroutines just feel right.

3. Ability to use multiple major versions of a library. Diamond dependencies are an unsolved problem in many languages I've worked with, but with Go you don't ever even think about them.

4. Implicit interfaces. Having to write "implements X" just to be able to use a type always felt wrong. Implicit interfaces just make sense.

5. The gopher mascot. I just love that little guy.

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