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Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

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Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#91

Post by losingthefight »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #39
losingthefight wrote: post #6

I have been using Go in production since 2015 and can honestly say that other than the ternary operator, none of these have been a major issue for me. Granted, I am doing mostly REST API development so my use cases may be different, but I have never had an issue with capitalization or which interfaces are implemented. The tooling is by far some of the best I have used in a language. Paired with a good editor (I perso…

That's really interesting. How do you use Go with Elixir? I've never really gotten into Go, partially because I feel like there's a lot of overlap with what it does and what Elixir does. I could see using it for CLIs and various Unix scripting, but I've been doing that with Ruby, for the most part. I also considered learning Go for creating some native binaries for a few critical paths, but Rust seems like the best c…

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I don't really combine the two and use whichever makes the most sense. In my day to day, we are primary a Go microservices shop and are exploring Elixir for some video stuff. I've used some Elixir on side projects. Sorry I wasn't clear that I am not combining them, although I imagine if I was going to it would either be over some sort of gRPC implementation or using something like rabbit to hand over tasks.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#92

Post by mixmastamyk »

cr0sh wrote: post #60
kstenerud wrote: post #3

This article is from 2016, but it's still relevant. Even in medium sized projects I've been bitten by many of these issues, and for a language that's supposed to eschew magic, there's an awful lot of wizardry going on. Stopping compilation with an error for every unused import & variable is particularly annoying, so much so that I've patched the go compiler to treat them as warnings instead [1]. Ultimately, I think t…

> Stopping compilation with an error for every unused import & variable is particularly annoying It's been a long while since I last touched Golang, but I recall the process of learning it. My coworker and I were tasked with creating an interface for our employer (a cloud service provider) to allow Rancher (or clients of Rancher - I forget) to use our backend system (which was built out of a combination of PHP, Java,…

Yes, I think the idea is good. Maybe less annoying if there could be a lax dev mode (-d) that didn't complain about such things until you were ready and in the cleanup stage. Then you'd run format and it would compile in normal mode.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#93

Post by losingthefight »

sdegutis wrote: post #45
losingthefight wrote: post #6

I have been using Go in production since 2015 and can honestly say that other than the ternary operator, none of these have been a major issue for me. Granted, I am doing mostly REST API development so my use cases may be different, but I have never had an issue with capitalization or which interfaces are implemented. The tooling is by far some of the best I have used in a language. Paired with a good editor (I perso…

If you're just writing a REST API, I wonder, why did you choose Go for this instead of Java or Python?

Aside from what others have said, the single tiny binary and cross-environment compilation is a huge plus. I can compile my largest service in seconds for Windows, Linux, and Mac (we still use Docker, but not for the cross-environment reasons). It's simple, concise, and fast out of the box. I also have been bitten far too many times by the JVM being RAM hungry and, frankly, I focus on startups which don't have time or resources to spend tweaking VM variables. Granted, I am sure Java and the JVM have come a long way since I last used it heavily in 2013, but I haven't found a single reason to want to go back.

As far as Python, same kind of reasons. Single binary makes deployments easy, static analysis and built in tooling makes life easier, and I just find it more enjoyable, which is completely subjective.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#94

Post by nhooyr »

lkramer wrote: post #14

most of these seems reasonable, but they are not big enough for me to actively dislike the language. The capitalisation is maybe the most annoying for me, I think it was designed with an IDE in mind (which would be able to automatic update all references), but I still find it a flawed design to have to touch potentially a lot of files, many places to change something from private to not private. The problem with err…

You can just use gorename.

https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/gorename

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#95

Post by Boxxed »

simias wrote: post #82
gerbilly wrote: post #31

Does anyone remember reading K&R for the first time? To me seemed like C was such a tight, perfect little design. Only thirty keywords, and simple consistent semantics.¹ When I first learned it, it was still pre ANSI, and you declared a function like this int f(a) char *a { } The ANSI style function declaration was maybe the only innovation that came after that that significantly improved the language. I remember in…

>To me seemed like C was such a tight, perfect little design. Only thirty keywords, and simple consistent semantics. Except that clearly history showed that it wasn't enough, and we ended up with about 50 millions (and counting) different meaning for "static" for instance. I like C but its simplicity is almost by accident more than by design. It's pretty far from "perfect" in my book. There are so many weird features…

> Why do we need both . and -> ? The compiler is always able to know which one makes sense from the type of the variable anyway.

I've often wondered this myself. The best I can come up with is that the underlying code generation includes an additional dereferencing step with ->, so having both . and -> makes the compiler a little more transparent.

Of course, in C++ you really need both because overloading -> is nice for e.g. objects that want to look like pointers.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#96

Post by throwaway34241 »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #44
gerbilly wrote: post #31

Does anyone remember reading K&R for the first time? To me seemed like C was such a tight, perfect little design. Only thirty keywords, and simple consistent semantics.¹ When I first learned it, it was still pre ANSI, and you declared a function like this int f(a) char *a { } The ANSI style function declaration was maybe the only innovation that came after that that significantly improved the language. I remember in…

I just started digging into C a few years ago and was struck by the same. It's amazingly simple and the only "flaw" that leaps out at me is the precedence of & and | being higher than comparison operators. Other than that, and maybe the macro system, everything frustrating about learning it was due to the frustration of dealing with the machine rather than anything C itself imposed on me.

The modern aggressive undefined-behavior based optimizations ruins any remaining appeal of the "simplicity" of C for me. The extremely broad definition of undefined behavior may allow the compiler to, for example, silently delete explicit checks for signed integer overflow [1] among other things and still claim standards compliance, but I don't think that programming model can reasonably be described as simple.

It many ways Go feels like an updated C. It retains most of the basic abilities of C, while cleaning up some things (headers, etc), having more basic libraries included, and choosing some defaults around things like out-of-bounds array access that are probably more appropriate for the majority of most programs (outside of particular hot loops, etc) in an era where software is often connected to the network and security is a bigger concern.

[1] https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475, http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#97

Post by Boxxed »

gerbilly wrote: post #42
weberc2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you prefer it be implemented?

I don't know, I'll go and read up on it more. The feature leaves me 'meh'. I don't find slices as awesome as everyone is always saying, especially without negative indices. I guess part of it it that it isn't always clear to me when you're dealing with a slice, or an array, or whatever. I know, when it's confusing, there's always some reasonable sounding explanation after the fact, sure, but the whole thing feels lik…

Do you know any other systems languages, like C or C++? This kind of thing makes a lot more sense when you have some surrounding context.

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#98

Post by AlchemistCamp »

ChrisSD wrote: post #75
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just started digging into C a few years ago and was struck by the same. It's amazingly simple and the only "flaw" that leaps out at me is the precedence of & and | being higher than comparison operators. Other than that, and maybe the macro system, everything frustrating about learning it was due to the frustration of dealing with the machine rather than anything C itself imposed on me.

C can be quite complex once you get into all the abstractions it's using. And even for newbies I think the whole syntax around pointers is unnecessarily confusing (or at least people are often confused by it in a way they usually aren't when learning assembly). Not to mention how many keywords and symbols are overloaded and depend on their context for meaning.

To be fair, I never learned it in its heyday and even now, I've just worked on some toy utilities and an 8088 emulator.

I've never used it for work or open source or anything "real".

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#99

Post by Boxxed »

gerbilly wrote: post #37

My one line take on this: You don't use Go for the language design, you use it for the tooling.

100% agreed -- it's crazy to me how much stuff you can just sweep under the rug when you have fast compilation, a decent debugger, static binaries, and so on.

I always tell people, "I love everything about Go except for the language."

Re: Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)

#100

Post by AlchemistCamp »

losingthefight wrote: post #91
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting. How do you use Go with Elixir? I've never really gotten into Go, partially because I feel like there's a lot of overlap with what it does and what Elixir does. I could see using it for CLIs and various Unix scripting, but I've been doing that with Ruby, for the most part. I also considered learning Go for creating some native binaries for a few critical paths, but Rust seems like the best c…

Sorry if I wasn't clear. I don't really combine the two and use whichever makes the most sense. In my day to day, we are primary a Go microservices shop and are exploring Elixir for some video stuff. I've used some Elixir on side projects. Sorry I wasn't clear that I am not combining them, although I imagine if I was going to it would either be over some sort of gRPC implementation or using something like rabbit to h…

Ah, that makes sense!
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