Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rob Pike interview

evrone.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 273 posts

Re: Rob Pike interview

#71

Post by blablabla123 »

cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

> I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here.

> Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language.

Already with the release of Go 1 it was quite clear that Go has its best fit as a Server language. I don't think the usage of a language can really be planned. But looking at the previous works of the language authors, it's clear that they worked on solutions for distributed systems.

Also I think like 10 years ago people would have written stuff in C++ that today nobody would even remotely consider writing in it.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#72

Post by kyrra »

cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

My take on the "systems programming" comment Rob made, it wasn't meant as "kernel" level systems programming, but more server-side systems. When he started working on Go, it was done out of his annoyance with C++ on the very large project he worked on at Google.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#73

Post by cletus »

seneca wrote: post #51
cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

A couple of nitpicks. > More to the point, users of [Kubernetes] don't really use Go as a result, right? Yeah, they do actually. The vast majority of tooling in the Kubernetes space is also written in Go. I don't know about etcd. > The small one is the lack of IDE support. You don't need to write an IDE. You just need to have sufficient integration into Jetbrains IDEs (at a minimum). I might be missing what you're sa…

> I might be missing what you're saying here, but Goland has been around for a decent while now, and the full IntelliJ plugin has as well.

Right. That's true now (and, like you say, has been for some times) but was not the case for years. I was responding to this point in the interview talking about initial development, not the current state of the world, just to clarify.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#74

Post by greyman »

bfrog wrote: post #44
jpgvm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasonably high. There is a good deal of frustration with Go from experienced programmers that worked with it for several years and grew tired of the tedium involved. Rust has some obstacles to overcome to supplant Go on a wider scale though. Namely compile time and learning curve - especially in relation to concurrency and async which are key features to replacing Go as it's main draw is it's green runtime.

Go has no expressiveness to it. You end up either with a large pile of copy pasted code, code generators, or massively error prone runtime introspection. Go blows up the entire idea of Don't Repeat Yourself. The language actively encourages it.

> Go blows up the entire idea of Don't Repeat Yourself.

Yes, this is true. I programm in Go professionally, about 50% of my work time (other half is python). But in many cases, I have found that copying the same code to other places doesn't have that much negative consequences as one would believe.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#76

Post by wbl »

cletus wrote: post #52
k__ wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter." This is quite funny. I remember when Go was released its creators were all like "GC is good enough now" and then Rust came around the corner blowing that whole premise out of the window.

I guess every language has its devotees. Go is no exception. My own personal experience with talking to more than a few of these people were that they tended to be a bit... naive and overly optimistic, which is fine, but often the lessons of history were ignored. The way I like to put it is Go devotees operate under 2 rules: 1. Whatever your complaint about Go is, it's totally not a problem (eg stop-the-world GC paus…

Pauseless concurrent collectors have existed for decades.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#77

Post by richm31415 »

cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

> The small one is the lack of IDE support. You don't need to write an IDE. You just need to have sufficient integration into Jetbrains IDEs (at a minimum).

Visual Studio Code with the Go extension is very good.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#78

Post by lostmsu »

jrockway wrote: post #36
REALiSTiC wrote: post #9

What a wild generalization. I skimmed the article, and I see his point in "Go was designed by people working at Google to make it easier to write Google-relevant software, in particular network-resident servers", but that doesn't mean Docker and Kubernetes (and other tools that enable communicating with/usage of cloud infrastructure) being written in Go made it become the de-facto standard, and especially not "the la…

Go certainly has a lot of mindshare in this space, and that can't be ignored. Some components of my production infrastructure I've used over the last year: cert-manager, concourse-ci, docker-registry, cilium, coredns, loki, grafana, prometheus, jaeger, influxdb, kubernetes, open-policy-agent; all those are Go. It's at the point where if you're in the business of writing software to run software, you're kind of surpri…

Huh? I am sure 80%+ of AWS is Java and probably 90%+ of Azure is C#. I doubt it is going to change any time soon. Kubernetes is but one successful cloud product out of Google, and it just happened to be written in Go. There are even rumors in that thread about it starting as Java.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#79

Post by harikb »

cletus wrote: post #26

I have huge respect for Rob Pike but there's a bit of revisionist history going on here. Go was originally envisioned as a systems programming language. It was often called "a better C". This exposed Rob Pike's lack of experience in the area (IMHO) because anyone who had done any systems programming at all knew that garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter. Where Go succeeded was completely unintenti…

> garbage collection made any systems language a nonstarter.

Unless you want to bucket all systsme programming in to one bucket, I will say this

#1 If your goal is to make the most efficient and fast code (garbage collected or not), it is not clear gc-less languages are always better. Sometimes, not free-ing the memory at the first possible time will actually be good for you overall.

#2 If you are writing anything with serious mem usage in Go, you will optimize for allocations using sync.Pool or some other form of reuse. I am sure well written C++ code would have to do the same tricks. reduce >> reuse >> recycle. Both GC and free() are recyclers. Sure, one could argue GC could provide more control.

I 100% agree there are cases C/C++ or Rust would be better for 20% of the trickier situation, but let us not base it all on the presence of garbage collector.

Heck, some of my Java code works faster than even my Go code. I don't blame Java for having a garbage collector.

Re: Rob Pike interview

#80

Post by fcantournet »

joshgachnang wrote: post #6

A few fellow OpenStack developers and I half-jokingly suggested we rewrite some or all the services in Go. Python gets to be a bit hard to deal with at that scale.

I used to work at an Openstack shop (small public cloud) We considered this several times, very much not-jokingly. Ultimately the investments never came. At least for Swift the object-server was re-written in go as an alternative implementation.
Post reply on HN