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Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

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Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#11

Post by deepsun »

notankies wrote: post #2

It's a real good Java

Unfortunately, Go is not even close by the number of tools written for it, at least for web services, where I work. It's hard to imagine something useful that doesn't have either JVM port, or originally written in Java (testing/mocking, builders, freaking ORMs, frameworks).

It's not always good though, in Java world you have to choose between multiple competing tools, while other ecosystems have mostly only one, often adopted from Java version (except Javascript, Rust, they have their own zoos). But IMHO Java is still the nursery for all kinds of tools for development.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#13

Post by ram_rar »

Its a good compromise between python and java. We gradually moved our codebases from python to golang. This has reduced our infra cost quite a bit. Some of our mission critical stuff is still in C++ and I'm fairly certain golang would not replace any of those. I hope the golang community takes a thing or two from rust in terms of package management.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#14

Post by marvinblum »

I've been using Go as my main programming language for the past 5 years or so, and it's still my favorite language (picking from PHP, Java, C++, Python, and a few more I have experience with). Its simplicity makes it relatively easy to write high quality software and reduces maintenance, as there are no breaking changes in the language itself. Tooling is on point, you get everything you need, standard formatting (which helps to keep all code bases in the wild consistent), and cross compile.

One of the things that might make it even better are generics, but I haven't really missed them so far. In conclusion, I don't think I will switch to anything else soon.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#15

Post by pizlonator »

It’s a unique and different language that clearly hit some kind of niche. It’s great when a language has any users and this one has quite a bunch. That’s super cool!

Personally I don’t like it. Not low level enough for when I need to go low level, not high level enough when I want to go high level. Also I would have wanted generics right from the start; that should be the norm for typed languages unless the types are really super simple (Go’s are complex enough to warrant generics in my opinion).

But, maybe the reason why Go has the niche it has is because other programmers prefer it the way it so. So it goes with languages - it’s an aesthetics thing just as much as it is a technical thing.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#17

Post by SubGenius »

Decent for writing web backends, APIs, RPC services. The high number of libraries also help. The language is very simple, which is good or bad, depending on who you ask.

Tooling could use a lot of work though. After switching between vim-go, gopls, and a handful of other language server implementations, I've given up on auto-completion, definitions etc altogether. Maybe it's my setup...

Overall, I'm pretty happy with running a fairly big Go app in production. Would I choose Go for my next serious project? Most likely.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#18

Post by sevagh »

midrus wrote: post #10
pmb wrote: post #7

They tried to make a better C++ and accidentally made a better Java and a better Python.

Agree over the java part. But Python is still orders of magnitude more productive, being it because of the ecosystem, available libraries, frameworks, or almost any other metric. The only advantage over python is performance, and maybe static typing depending on your taste.

Go more than makes up for this in the deployment aspect, since deploying Python in 2020 (Python 2, Python 3, conda, pip, venv, system interpreter, poetry, etc.) is still a mess.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#19

Post by anonymoushn »

Non-exported struct fields are a way of preventing your library from being composable. Checking if a value implements an interface is a way of writing surprising bugs. The standard library uses both of these features extensively, to give users bugs and prevent itself from being composable.

Checking that the user uses all values bound to variables but letting them discard errors by not binding them to a variable is a weird choice. Channels panicking instead of returning an error is a weird choice.

It's ok and I would like to to use it instead of Java.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#20

Post by marvinblum »

SubGenius wrote: post #17

Decent for writing web backends, APIs, RPC services. The high number of libraries also help. The language is very simple, which is good or bad, depending on who you ask. Tooling could use a lot of work though. After switching between vim-go, gopls, and a handful of other language server implementations, I've given up on auto-completion, definitions etc altogether. Maybe it's my setup... Overall, I'm pretty happy with…

Have you tried GoLand?
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