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New case studies about Google’s use of Go

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Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#91

Post by erokar »

piazz wrote: post #84

I played around with Go a while ago, and while I appreciated the approach to concurrency, I was really put off by both the boilerplate + how primitive the type system felt. Not having map and filter due to lack of generics meant writing for loops all over the place just to filter and modify arrays. Appending elements to slices felt clumsy. The type system didn't feel expressive, and I often found myself having to res…

I share much of the sentiment. I like the simplicity of Go, but I think they took it too far an ended up with something too dumbed down and lacking in abstractions and expressive power. It feels like a step backwards coming from other contemporary and popular languages like JS/TS, Python, Kotlin, C#.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#92

Post by zerr »

mabbo wrote: post #75

While I do trust Rob Pike to not let personal biases sway his writing, I do have to wonder if the case studies weren't selecting because they were positive. So I'm curious: does anyone have a case study where using Go was a disaster? Every language has things it's good at, and things it's bad at. Where does Go not do well?

Go is officially banned by Google for Fuchsia: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/policy...

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#93

Post by [deleted] »

Knut4231 wrote: post #40
saagarjha wrote: post #17

Important point: this is Google's use of Go, not your use of Go. Take note to check whether their results are applicable to you before adding it to your repertoire of "reasons we should use Go at our company".

What are you trying to say? Go is at my employer's (one of the top 3 car companies world wide) techradar the number one to adopt. New stuff of all kind is done in Go. So, Go is a huge success outside of Google as well. Not saying that I'm of any importance for Go, but I'm using Go for personal projects, at work for CLIs and standard backend stuff (APIs + DB, Redis, etc.) with great success.

[deleted]

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#94

Post by nedsma »

Go is super productive. My day-to-day responsibilities include development in .NET and Go. A full day working in Go is like a having a pleasant day off. On the other hand, .NET is so cumbersome, complex and verbose (I've been using it since its inception), that I'd rather abandon it for good if possible.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#95

Post by geodel »

piazz wrote: post #84

I played around with Go a while ago, and while I appreciated the approach to concurrency, I was really put off by both the boilerplate + how primitive the type system felt. Not having map and filter due to lack of generics meant writing for loops all over the place just to filter and modify arrays. Appending elements to slices felt clumsy. The type system didn't feel expressive, and I often found myself having to res…

No need to convince. If you've got something working nicely why would e.g. I spend my energy to convince you otherwise.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#96

Post by tptacek »

mabbo wrote: post #75

While I do trust Rob Pike to not let personal biases sway his writing, I do have to wonder if the case studies weren't selecting because they were positive. So I'm curious: does anyone have a case study where using Go was a disaster? Every language has things it's good at, and things it's bad at. Where does Go not do well?

Case studies like these are always selected because they’re positive; you don’t have to wonder about the biases. Someone else might want to collect the negative cases; Discord, for instance, and their fights with the GC.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#97

Post by skywhopper »

piazz wrote: post #84

I played around with Go a while ago, and while I appreciated the approach to concurrency, I was really put off by both the boilerplate + how primitive the type system felt. Not having map and filter due to lack of generics meant writing for loops all over the place just to filter and modify arrays. Appending elements to slices felt clumsy. The type system didn't feel expressive, and I often found myself having to res…

This sort of comment is not really relevant to the article that was posted, which is not about Go's type system, or convincing TypeScript users to switch to Go. I'm sorry that you don't like Go's types, but I'm going to guess it's not really targeted at your needs if you are a TS user.

It's okay not to use Go for your projects. But there's no need to drop your personal opinion of a language into a post about specific case studies of how that language is used inside a company.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#98

Post by reggieband »

jeffbee wrote: post #51
logicslave12 wrote: post #15

Sure they made Go. But where are the innovations in search and information retrieval? Where are new data products? Sure, they innovated on word embeddings. But If they are going to monopolize and control access to information, why are they doing such a poor job at it? I say this with some anger. This company affects all of us, and they are completely mediocre from a product perspective. I welcome the day when NLP get…

Whatever your opinion of the user-facing features of Google, it is true that you would not have access to most of them if Google didn't have deep skills in large-scale systems programming which allows them to whip up products that nobody else could afford to offer. How do you think they are able to offer infinite jpeg storage to every human, for free?

> infinite jpeg storage to every human, for free?

How does one get free infinite jpeg storage from Google? Way back when I had Picasa and I'm 90% sure there was a paid tier. I recall hearing something about Google offering free image storage to Google Pixel owners but that is a far cry smaller number of people than "every human" and the purchase price of a Pixel device isn't free.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#99

Post by tptacek »

zozbot234 wrote: post #30
lstamour wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, if you'd asked me almost a decade ago which language would compete with Go, I would not have answered "JavaScript"! Yet, these days I find that's the trade-off: build something "quick" in TypeScript that's easy to modify but perhaps a bit brittle and slow(er) to run in production, vs build something very considerate and optimized in Go but perhaps not something you can easily change without hiring folks s…

I mean, it's hard to see Go as "very considerate and optimized" given the existence of modern, highly-efficient programming languages like Rust, D, perhaps Swift etc. It's obviously better optimized than JavaScript and its derivatives, or even Java/C#, but that's not saying much.

It’s not reasonable to compare “optimization” between a zero-cost abstraction language like Rust and a GC-runtime language like Go. You write different programs in each.

There are idiomatic ways to avoid the GC in Go, and people do that in tiny places, but few people build ground-up that way, because it’s not the kind of program Go asks you to write.

Re: New case studies about Google’s use of Go

#100

Post by thebean11 »

the_af wrote: post #81
mabbo wrote: post #75

While I do trust Rob Pike to not let personal biases sway his writing, I do have to wonder if the case studies weren't selecting because they were positive. So I'm curious: does anyone have a case study where using Go was a disaster? Every language has things it's good at, and things it's bad at. Where does Go not do well?

I know a case (second hand) where they migrated from a Java backend to Go, then had to roll it all back to Java because it was too hard and error prone to maintain. This is a very successful business, not a startup. No idea why they felt they had to migrate to Go in the first place. I'd rather not mention the company, even though I did not work there.

Yeesh, I can't imagine migrating a large backend codebase from any language to any language.

And we're talking about migrating from Java..which is extremely well supported and probably the easiest language to hire for..

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