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The Go Programming Language and Environment

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Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#171

Post by 62951413 »

divan wrote: post #58

For me it were four things: 1) no bloat 2) great tooling 3) speed, speed, speed 4) developed by legends in Computer Science To expand a little bit more: 1) Go is still the only language is not developed by analogy (i.e. let's do X because all other languages have it). It's designed from the first principles, and that's why so many newcomers are buffed about weirdly different take on things they consider "basic" or "c…

"is not developed by analogy" is such a strange thing to say. Technology evolves in generations. The mistakes and lessons of one lead to the next. For example, in the sequence of C -> C++ -> Java -> Scala/Kotlin it's very easy to see how in each new iteration previously ugly areas were improved upon.

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#172

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dgb23 wrote: post #72

Go is successful for similar reasons as Java. - Backed by a well known Company with a good image (at the time). - Made by well known experts at the top of their field. - Most of the risky, complex and powerful stuff is in the runtime. - The language surface is small, familiar, conservative and consists of mostly orthogonal features. - Very straightforward to integrate libraries and a good standard library. - Portabil…

> scarier from a mainstream business perspective

I wouldn't just say mainstream business perspective. Go's small surface area makes it a great language for a team with large turnover. What better example of that than open source, where contributors come in, contribute a change, and then leave.

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#173

Post by tsimionescu »

eweise wrote: post #160
jasode wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- Made by really famous veteran language designers - Backed by Google Looking at decades of how various programming languages gain popularity, those proposed reasons don't seem that convincing when we look at counterexamples . E.g. counterexamples of unknown (at the time) creators creating popular languages : Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP). E.g. counterexamples of famous computer…

"1) compiles to a single executable that's easy to deploy. This is a compelling advantage over Java,C#,Python,Ruby that require runtimes or complicated virtual environments." Docker makes deploying Java about the same as Go

Except a Java container running a simple REST server is going to be a few hundred megs, while a similar Go container will be around 10 megs most likely.

Which doesn't matter all that much until you're distributing an app made out of 10-20 such services...

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#174

Post by jbergens »

dgb23 wrote: post #72

Go is successful for similar reasons as Java. - Backed by a well known Company with a good image (at the time). - Made by well known experts at the top of their field. - Most of the risky, complex and powerful stuff is in the runtime. - The language surface is small, familiar, conservative and consists of mostly orthogonal features. - Very straightforward to integrate libraries and a good standard library. - Portabil…

I think it has a very different timing than java. When java came out c++ was the standard and java was clearly easier (although slower). Go is not that much easier than java or c# and it is not much faster. I don't think the standard library is much better, or even better at all and when it was new it had a lot less 3rd party libraries.

Go will probably continue to grow in usage a while but I'm not certain it will pass even c# in usage.

I think there is too little to gain from rewriting java or c# code and for speed I think rust is better. We will see what happens the next 5 years or so.

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#175

Post by Jabbles »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #168
dgb23 wrote: post #72

Go is successful for similar reasons as Java. - Backed by a well known Company with a good image (at the time). - Made by well known experts at the top of their field. - Most of the risky, complex and powerful stuff is in the runtime. - The language surface is small, familiar, conservative and consists of mostly orthogonal features. - Very straightforward to integrate libraries and a good standard library. - Portabil…

One area in which Go lacks is its static type system. Until recently, it was practically straight out of the '70s. Static type systems are a mechanism for outlawing the compilation of programs that are known to be problematic at the expense of outlawing comparatively few good programs — a worthwhile trade-off for a language meant to be used in industry, especially when writing complicated code. It's a shame because t…

Are you responding to the parent's post and suggesting that this is something to do with Go's success, or are you simply complaining?

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#176

Post by eweise »

coldtea wrote: post #165
eweise wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"1) compiles to a single executable that's easy to deploy. This is a compelling advantage over Java,C#,Python,Ruby that require runtimes or complicated virtual environments." Docker makes deploying Java about the same as Go

A.k.a.: Why just have a single thing (a statically compiled binary), when you can have several moving pieces and different levels of infrastructure and configuration to worry about (the hypervisor, the container runtime, the container cli, the open ports and shared volumes configuration, the host OS image, the JVM inside the image, java memory and gc tuning, and so on)

Maybe you are building a standalone utility in Go that can be downloaded as a single binary. Great. Most places I work at, deploy to Kubernetes as docker containers

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#177

Post by everybodyknows »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #168
dgb23 wrote: post #72

Go is successful for similar reasons as Java. - Backed by a well known Company with a good image (at the time). - Made by well known experts at the top of their field. - Most of the risky, complex and powerful stuff is in the runtime. - The language surface is small, familiar, conservative and consists of mostly orthogonal features. - Very straightforward to integrate libraries and a good standard library. - Portabil…

One area in which Go lacks is its static type system. Until recently, it was practically straight out of the '70s. Static type systems are a mechanism for outlawing the compilation of programs that are known to be problematic at the expense of outlawing comparatively few good programs — a worthwhile trade-off for a language meant to be used in industry, especially when writing complicated code. It's a shame because t…

This has bitten me many times. In particular:

Slice index expressions accept any integer type. Integer subtypes can be defined, but there is no way to define a slice type that is legally indexed with only that defined type.

An expression a.b in some unfamiliar code may denote either a struct field access, or a pointer dereference followed by struct field access. We must read surrounding code (or lean on an IDE) to know which is meant. There was a lot to be said for C's -> operator, however unaesthetic it may appear to the eye.

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#178

Post by johannes1234321 »

jerf wrote: post #140
johannes1234321 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! The "killed by Google" meme is young. Back in the days it was like "i want to be like Google" (ignoring the fact that most people don't have scale like Google and very different problems) and anything out of Google must be good!

Google also can't really "kill" Go. The license doesn't permit it. They could stop supporting it, at which point the community may or may not pick it up. (I'm inclined to think they would, but I can't guarantee that.) They could try to drag it in some hypothetical super-Google oriented direction (integrating Google Cloud somehow deeply into the language?) but they haven't yet, and at this point, again I think the com…

I can't judge, as I have neither any insight into the development structure (how many non-Googler so relevant work) nor complexity (how many understand the deepest details of the compiler etc.) but I have seen different Open Sources Projects die a slow death after the primary developer went way. Everybody depended on the "free" labour being done and once gone one couldn't find agreement on how to go on. But yes, Go's spread is big enough that it won't immediately die and Google would probably be responsible enough to transfer to Linux foundation or ASF or somebody who can help to organize a new structure.

Anyways, key point was that Google reputation was different, when Go took up. I can imagine if it would launch now it would find different reaction, which could prevent a community forming, thus less of safety.

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#179

Post by sockpuppet_12 »

tempodox wrote: post #62
JavaOnlyGuy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why people always mention tooling but never explicitly mention which tooling they miss? I use Java for 4 years and I constantly find stuff that's missing here where other languages have it baked in from day one

> I constantly find stuff that's missing You didn't mention which tooling you miss.

> tooling

Neither did you.

Re: The Go Programming Language and Environment

#180

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

Jabbles wrote: post #175
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One area in which Go lacks is its static type system. Until recently, it was practically straight out of the '70s. Static type systems are a mechanism for outlawing the compilation of programs that are known to be problematic at the expense of outlawing comparatively few good programs — a worthwhile trade-off for a language meant to be used in industry, especially when writing complicated code. It's a shame because t…

Are you responding to the parent's post and suggesting that this is something to do with Go's success, or are you simply complaining?

Ah, you're absolutely right. I rewrote some parts of my comment a few times and accidentally removed the bit that actually connected it haha.

My point was that Go seems to have managed to be successful (for some reasonable definitions of "successful") despite at least one large deficiency. In fact, it is the same deficiency for which Java's success can be said to be surprising, though Java had ~20 years fewer history to draw upon. (Java is relevant because it's what the parent comment was comparing Go to.) It is disappointing to me that Go had a really good position to provide a new language in a specific niche, but they squandered at least one significant aspect of the language design due to (in my opinion) a lack of knowledge in the relevant area. This despite being designed by "experts at the top of their field", as the parent comment noted.

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