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Featherweight Go

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Re: Featherweight Go

#91

Post by saturn_vk »

jdub wrote: post #43
eeh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting all new typed languages have generics? What makes you so sure there isn't room in the design space for a typed language without generics? As much as I like generics, Go's popularity is a success: programmers have spoken, and they value other things more than generics. Hindsight is 20/20, and even this isn't a commitment to introduce generics in Go.

"programmers have spoken, and they"...'ve done quite a lot of work to get the benefits of generics without language support. You can pretty much look at any large Go project (famously Kubernetes) and see a workaround of some shape or form.

While k8s's code is atrocious, I wonder if that isn't due to its legacy translation from Java (iirc, it was written in it initially)

Re: Featherweight Go

#92

Post by shurikdima »

lima wrote: post #64
thurn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started learning rust as a quarantine project, and my <5000 line project takes ~10 seconds to do an incremental development build and 1-2 seconds to typecheck

I work with a ~10k line project and it takes 60s to incrementally compile on a Ryen 3990X. Rust is great, but the compile times do need to improve :-)

What do you mean by "incrementally compile"? an addition of a single line of code results in a 60s build? never experienced anything like that, only the first compile is slow for me.

Re: Featherweight Go

#93

Post by xkapastel »

baby wrote: post #77
voidfunc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this just highlights how massive a mistake the Go developers made not including generics from Day 1. It was a mistake in Java that they corrected with a lot of pain. It is a mistake in Go they are going to correct and most likely with a lot of pain. If they cannot do it seamlessly it may end up being a Python 2/3 platform split. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I'd say the popularity of Go stems from the lack of generics.

And why on earth would you say that?

Re: Featherweight Go

#94

Post by pcwalton »

baby wrote: post #77
voidfunc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this just highlights how massive a mistake the Go developers made not including generics from Day 1. It was a mistake in Java that they corrected with a lot of pain. It is a mistake in Go they are going to correct and most likely with a lot of pain. If they cannot do it seamlessly it may end up being a Python 2/3 platform split. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I'd say the popularity of Go stems from the lack of generics.

No, it doesn't. Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it, as well as the fact that it's useful for a lot of people despite the lack of generics.

Certainly, a lot of people are attracted to Rob Pike's rather idiosyncratic preferences, tastes, and nostalgia for the early days of Unix, which are on display in a lot of Go's design decisions, like the lack of generics. But lots of random people have preferences and nostalgia for all sorts of things; we usually only pay attention to such things when it's a person with a famous pedigree who has them.

Re: Featherweight Go

#95

Post by pcwalton »

jstarks wrote: post #67
pjmlp wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go's popularity is due to author's employer. Both its main influences, Oberon-2 and Limbo had zero traction on the market, and Limbo not only is quite close to Go, it had an whole OS full of the Plan 9 ideas to come along, yet it failed on the market. Lack of generics has already been publicly acknowldge as problem. > In three years of Go surveys, lack of generics has always been listed as one of the top three proble…

Is Dart's lack of popularity in spite of its author's employer, then?

Dart's lack of popularity is indeed in spite of the Google backing. I basically see two reasons. First, though Lars Bak has an impressive pedigree, Strongtalk and V8 aren't as well-known as Plan 9 and Unix. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, Dart had the appearance of "Google's attempt to kill JS", which neither endeared it to Web developers (who were riding a wave of JavaScript hype at the time) nor to other browser manufacturers (who were growing increasingly distrustful of Google's initiatives).

Re: Featherweight Go

#96

Post by onei »

shurikdima wrote: post #92
lima wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with a ~10k line project and it takes 60s to incrementally compile on a Ryen 3990X. Rust is great, but the compile times do need to improve :-)

What do you mean by "incrementally compile"? an addition of a single line of code results in a 60s build? never experienced anything like that, only the first compile is slow for me.

Incremental compilation results are subjective. If you just changed the file with "main" in it and there was nothing else in there, I'd expect it to be faster than changing a file at the bottom of the dependency tree as you then have to recompile a lot more.

Perhaps they're changing some fundamentals of the codebase and (unsurprisingly) the compiler seems slower than you might expect.

Re: Featherweight Go

#98

Post by baby »

pcwalton wrote: post #94
baby wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the popularity of Go stems from the lack of generics.

No, it doesn't. Go is popular because of the names and organization behind it, as well as the fact that it's useful for a lot of people despite the lack of generics. Certainly, a lot of people are attracted to Rob Pike's rather idiosyncratic preferences, tastes, and nostalgia for the early days of Unix, which are on display in a lot of Go's design decisions, like the lack of generics. But lots of random people have p…

at least to me, the lack of generics was a benefit. I'm probably not alone :)

Re: Featherweight Go

#99

Post by [deleted] »

ainar-g wrote: post #26

From the conclusion: Featherweight Go is restricted to a tiny subset of Go. We plan a model of other important features such as assignments, arrays, slices, and packages, which we will dub Bantamweight Go; and a model of Go’s innovative concurrency mechanism based on “goroutines” and message passing, which we will dub Cruiserweight Go. Love the naming!

[deleted]

Re: Featherweight Go

#100

Post by smarterclayton »

saturn_vk wrote: post #91
jdub wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"programmers have spoken, and they"...'ve done quite a lot of work to get the benefits of generics without language support. You can pretty much look at any large Go project (famously Kubernetes) and see a workaround of some shape or form.

While k8s's code is atrocious, I wonder if that isn't due to its legacy translation from Java (iirc, it was written in it initially)

Kubernetes had a non-public prototype in Java. None of the code in the main tree even resembles the code from that prototype (I was one of the first non-googlers to contribute).

It’s just ugly because that’s how it evolved after a community formed and that’s what real evolved software looks like. :)

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