Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

91–100 of 310 posts

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

#91
post #27

I use go (long term) in places where I need as part of my DR plan the ability to fix stuff without expert access. The toolchain is simple enough that I can maintain it in this scenario alone, and meanwhile the stdlib is complete enough as to be useful for solving a multitude of problems, while offering the ability to produce programs that run on many systems and integrate with them with sufficient efficiency. It's a…

Could you elaborate on why you think it doesn't scale well for teams?

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

#92
post #13

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.

> I hope the golang community takes a thing or two from rust in terms of package management.

Go's dependency management was designed after analyzing Cargo and its problems: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-mvs

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

#93
post #10
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.

It may be more productive if you are the sole consumer of your code. If you need to ship code to be run by third parties Python tends to result in overly complex and tedious setup process. One shouldn't ignore that users of Python applications often have to pay the price.

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

#94
post #22

My fingers are getting real tired from typing if err != nil all the damn time. I do like it for small things - compiling to one (albeit huge) binary and its relative speediness is nice. I wouldn't use it for large systems though. The amount of code really balloons over time, relative to, say, python and that SLOC correlates to bugs and maintenance cost.

Curious, what's your definition of a large system?

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

#95
post #57

Speaking strictly about the language, and not the platform, I'm skeptical about the lack of more modern core library and language features like immutability, pattern matching, and records. They spent almost 10 years saying "we don't need generics", but now are implementing it Also, the dependency management.

> They spent almost 10 years saying "we don't need generics", but now are implementing it You're making things up. Not a single member of the Go team ever said "we don't need generics". In fact, the FAQ stated from day one that they "continue to think about it", and that "Generics may well be added at some point".

They've always also said "show us some compelling use cases", as if those still need to be shown ~15 years after after every other language except C got them.

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

#96
post #88
post #87

It’s a boring language and I avoid it where I can help it. Its facilities for abstraction are too limited, everything is a loop, if err return, and so on. It’s just not a language I’d use by choice for anything.

What do you prefer?

Python for almost everything, but I’ve been getting into Elixir for web tier, and Nim is SO much more pleasant/featureful for a quick compiled language. I’d be happy to use any of the above for things but would feel “forced to” if I had to do anything in Go.

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

#98

Being backed by Google contributes a big deal to its (relative) success. I think it is the most limited and ugliest of all the "modern" languages (Rust, D, Zig (never tried Swift)). And at the same time it seems to have the most significant output of all these (docker, kubernetes, gitea...).

I find it more important that it is backed by Rob Pike.

He doesn't cancel things when he gets bored with them.

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

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flask is better in the little mechanics of interacting with HTTP - parsing a parameter out of a URL (in Flask, it's a function argument; in Go, it's at least one extra line per arg), returning JSON (just return a dictionary in Flask), handling errors. Flask also is able to auto-reload the code when it changes (turn on development mode) which is really convenient. Plus all the ways that Python is more convenient than…

But...you are comparing a web framework with a Go's standard library. I mean, it's not a fair comparison. I'm pretty sure there are Go modules that support those handy things.

doesn't go stdlib contain an http server library "that you are supposed to use in prod"?

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

#100

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…

Sorry you've had issues with gopls, the gopls deep completions are one of my favorite things!

At this point gopls works way better than godef+gocode ever did for me.

Post reply on HN