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I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

fasterthanli.me

1–10 of 508 posts

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#2
Maybe I'm a zealot, but I don't really consider "doesn't work as well on windows" a con of a language.

C# is (or at least used to be) utter garbage on Linux compared to Windows. I don't hold that against C#, but rather recognize that Linux/Windows are very different, and that compiler maintenance and development is non-trivial (and obviously Microsoft is going to prioritize Windows).

This article is basically a rant that Go was designed with *nix in mind and that Windows is a second-class citizen by comparison.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#3
2/3rds about platform FS incompat, last third about only a couple of things like time comparisons being monotonic now (does more good than bad IMO).

I suspect if issues of such importance are enough to make you want off the "wild ride", you will not find a ride suitable.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#4
Uh okay, lots of "but windows" and a few misinformed takes about the http lib (using contexts over using a client instance with a timeout set) alongside ripping apart a random package I've never used or heard of for having a huge dependency graph.

Such a long article, for this?

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#5
I felt the same way after writing a large (100kloc) project in Go, this is back when go was 1.0 or so as well. It started off well enough, but eventually started to fail in helping me create the software I needed to make.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#6
> which makes a lot of problems impossible to model accurately

Impossible?

> (instead, you have to fall back to reflection, which is extremely unsafe, and the API is very error-prone),

Extremely unsafe?

> when you make something simple, you move complexity elsewhere.

Does it? Or did you, in reality, not really make it simpler?

> Go says “don't worry about encodings! things are probably utf-8”

Does it? https://blog.golang.org/strings

It just sounds like the author is very frustrated at some seemingly minor inconsistencies (from their perspective), and the extreme language used for things that are not that extreme are evidence in my opinion. Blogging can be a good exercise to shed some frustration, I definitely understand that aspect. Not sure this needs to be shared as a good example of anything or taken in any light, other than "someone is venting."

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#7
main gripe seems to be that go will "optimize for the 90% case, ignoring correctness" -- particularly leading to issues on non-unix systems like windows.

That fits Go's stated goals afaik. While I understand the author ran into problems for their use-case, I did not find this rant compelling as a general criticism.

Re: I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride

#10
i went through the pain points of Go myself but that was at the beginning when i was expecting behavior i was used to from previous language(s) and from trying to force the previously learnt norms onto Go.

Reading the blog post(i wrote something similar that got a ton of views here few years ago) it sounds more like the issue is between the keyboard and the armchair, not with the language itself.

As with anything else, if you don't like it, don't use it. If you like Rust, Rust away.

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