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

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

#71

Post by peterashford »

I think it's a very pragmatic language and I like that.

I hate the error handling.

I dislike implicit interfaces - they make refactoring harder. The existence of interface assertions is an anti pattern.

The standard library leaves a lot to be desired. It's very much not a "batteries included" language.

The go community are super defensive and resistent to criticism. So many times I see people ask reasonable questions about something lacking g in go only to be told that it's their fault for wanting it.

I may sound negative but I actually rather like go. But no language is perfect, obvs.

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

#72

Post by peterashford »

liampulles wrote: post #53
Winsaucerer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good list. Regarding (4) Implicit interfaces -- to me, it's implicit interfaces that feel wrong :) Something having a method with a particular signature doesn't seem to me to be any kind of promise that it's intended to be used for the interface that expects that method. 'implements X', is a clear statement that yes, this method is made just for that specific interface. But this is just academic. I've never actually…

Here's what I do: ``` type Doer interface { Do() error } type CanDoer struct{} var _ Doer = &CanDoer{} // This ``` If CanDoer does not implement Doer, it will fail to compile, and you can quickly see what you need to do to fix.

This is, IMO, clear indication of a lack in the language

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

#73

Post by jolmg »

joshuak wrote: post #69
jolmg wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's glossed over because it's trivial, isn't it? Just statically link libcurl through a binding. And at least Haskell also has Haskell-implemented HTTP and TLS libraries. There's even options.

Then why not assume it is the static linking that is trivial? Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon. The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such librarie…

> Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon.

I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence.

> The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such libraries.

I think you're taking our discussion as if it were about if the language is cool or not. I never argued against that.

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

#74

Post by joshuak »

cratermoon wrote: post #56
dijit wrote: post #46

I'm a sysadmin type, so take this with a grain of salt. Like: - Compiled and can be run as a scripting language. - Easy to learn, quite simple to use (even concurrency!) - Cross compilation is an environment variable setting. - Fast compilation, though apparently this gets worse with reflection and generics (and it's not that important to me honestly) Dislike: - The opinionated build/dependency system, which sort of…

I love case-based visibility. I don't have to look at any declaration beyond the name to know if I can use the identifier outside of the package it's declared in. In most other languages case is just convention and visibility is determined by another keyword. Yes, I know programmers who came from a Java or C# background who continue to use naming conventions from those languages, to their detriment. I don't blame Go…

I really hated this feature at first, but it's one of my absolute favorite things about Go now. In general Go communicates more information than other programming languages without nearly as much visual clutter. When reading code one rarely needs to check elsewhere to fully understand what is intended.

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

#75

Post by cesarb »

It's been a long time since I last looked at golang, but the first time I met it, I instantly disliked the way it imposed its own idea of filesystem organization onto the user. I wanted to run a Heartbleed checker, and instead of being able to clone the repository into a new subdirectory inside my ~/projects and compiling and running from there, like I would do for projects written in any other language, the go compiler required that the project was cloned into a global centralized path, where all projects written in golang would end up, mixed together without any separation.

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

#76

Post by majewsky »

cesarb wrote: post #75

It's been a long time since I last looked at golang, but the first time I met it, I instantly disliked the way it imposed its own idea of filesystem organization onto the user. I wanted to run a Heartbleed checker, and instead of being able to clone the repository into a new subdirectory inside my ~/projects and compiling and running from there, like I would do for projects written in any other language, the go compi…

The requirement to work in GOPATH has been dropped around 2018. Nowadays, by default Go is running in module mode which works pretty much like in all other languages with builtin module management.

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

#77

Post by majewsky »

tech_tuna wrote: post #32
pjmlp wrote: post #18

What I like, It is a nice language had it been released in the mid-90's, following the footsteps of Oberon and Limbo. What I dislike, Being designed a decade later ignoring everything that happened in mainstream computing since Oberon and Limbo came to be, then adopting features that weren't properly backed in from the get go.

Can you elaborate more on what was ignored? For one, I think it's mind blowing that they didn't have a good system for dependency management in place from the get-go. Things are pretty good now with go modules but it's like they never even heard of languages like Python and the unholy mess that package management was (and still is to some extent) with Python.

Not mind-blowing at all. It's originally a language designed by Google, for Google, and Google famously uses a monorepo for most of their code. If you have a monorepo, package management is a non-issue.

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

#78

Post by joshuak »

jolmg wrote: post #73
joshuak wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not assume it is the static linking that is trivial? Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon. The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such librarie…

> Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon. I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence. > The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a…

> I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence.

Can you clarify what you mean by this because to me there is literally nothing about static linking that implies https as a consequence. The point about Go is centrally not that it uniquely has access to an https library.

The point is that it is included. This may not at first appear all that noteworthy, but this is a substantive quality of life improvement. The standard library not only provides a vary large set of common functionality it is packaged with the distribution, works on all the platforms supported by Go without user intervention, and is bound in lock step to the release version of the compiler.

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

#79

Post by nebiros »

abdusco wrote: post #28
ta3411 wrote: post #4

Love: - Ecosystem - Clean code - Single executable file Dislike: - Pointers -- maybe I am still getting the hang of it. But I feel like pointers throw off a lot of beginner programmers. Would love some practical advice here

> pointers Stick with pass-by-value and non-pointer receivers. Use pointers only if you have to.

here’s a good rationale about when to use pointers: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23551970/255463

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

#80

Post by hinoki »

dom96 wrote: post #22
hinoki wrote: post #16

As someone who likes async/await/coroutines, I really miss them in Go. Channels are the GOTO of synchronisation, they lead to confusing spaghetti code because there is no structure. Go is really nice to read (once you get used to the fact that half the lines of code in any function are for error handling) unless it uses a lot of channels. Then you need to take great care to understand every <-.

> As someone who likes async/await/coroutines, I really miss them in Go Interesting. Most complain about languages with async/await and say they want goroutines. What is it about async/await that you prefer over Go's approach?

Async/await allows you to be much more explicit about dependencies. I don’t care what thread executes something, but I do care that e.g. these three network requests happen in parallel. With async/await I can explicitly use an ‘await Promise.all(a, b, c)’ where Go would need a new channel and goroutines, etc. all being implicit, so it’s hard for the reader to know what the intent is, and it’s error prone, who knows if you properly clean everything up.
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