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Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

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Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#471

Post by merlindru »

lenkite wrote: post #448
daghamm wrote: post #47

The author lists multiple reasons for this, but for me the biggest one is the first one: Go is good for almost everything . I have extremely good productivity when using Go. Once your project exceeds 100 lines it is usually even better than python. And yes, I am aware that Rustians did a survey where Rust was crowned as the most efficient language but in my reality (which may differ from yours) Go is simply the best…

Go is not good for data science and ML. It doesn't even have a proper, maintained dataframe library for data-science. R and Python beat it hands on. Rust also beats it now thanks to polars. And mobile ? gomobile is not maintained. Fyne is amateur level on mobile. AFAIK Go has no maintained 3d game engines. Go has its well-established niche for middle-ware services and CLI tools. And that's about it. If your domain is…

Also anything that requires interop/FFI, syscalls, and lower level stuff. It's extremely hard to record your screen on Go, for example. On Rust this is much more doable and there even are crates for it

It's not impossible with Go, though. There's an amazing windows impl here: https://github.com/kirides/go-d3d

...but if you look at the code, it's clear that you have to work against the language in some capacity

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#472

Post by EE84M3i »

tazjin wrote: post #442
EE84M3i wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally my biggest issue with reading go code has come from the //go: magic comments that I never seem to fully understand. For example, what the heck is a //go:cgo_import_dynamic? As far as I can tell this is only documented on GitHub issues and mailing list comments.

It's in the cgo docs: https://go.dev/src/cmd/cgo/doc.go#L880

Hmm, where's the rendered html doc for this?

I don't see it on https://pkg.go.dev/cmd/cgo

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#473

Post by _xiaz »

bborud wrote: post #94

People always under-estimate the cost of properly learning a language. At any given time I tend to have a "main go-to language". I typically spend 2-4 years getting to the point where I can say I "know" a language. Then I try to stick to it long enough for the investment to pay off. Usually 8-10 years. A surprising number of people think this is a very long time. It isn't. This is typically the time it takes to under…

I believe people over-estimate the benefit of properly learning a language.

3-12 months seems to be sufficient for the specialisation benefits to outweigh the small hit to language competency.

My strategy is to be a generalist superficially learning specialized languages.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#474

Post by sapiogram »

danpalmer wrote: post #309
daghamm wrote: post #47

The author lists multiple reasons for this, but for me the biggest one is the first one: Go is good for almost everything . I have extremely good productivity when using Go. Once your project exceeds 100 lines it is usually even better than python. And yes, I am aware that Rustians did a survey where Rust was crowned as the most efficient language but in my reality (which may differ from yours) Go is simply the best…

> When people argue about the validity of these claims, I simply point them to this talk https://go.dev/talks/2012/concurrency.slide#42 There's nothing impressive in these slides. This may have been pretty good in 2012, but this code looks very much like the equivalent Swift or Rust.

It's better in Swift or Rust. Go channels are the worst thing about the language, even trivial use cases are difficult to get right.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#475

Post by lcof »

I feel mostly the same as the author. The Go ecosystem is so simple, logical and smooth that it is hard to reach out for something else. I do use other languages for one-off programs of course, be it bash, perl or javascript, depending on the task.

On bigger projects, the first pain point to appear for me is dependency management. It feels so antiquated in most other ecosystems, with loose compatibility contracts that add mental overhead. Go let’s you focus on the problem you are trying to solve, and you get so used to that luxury that using anything else quickly becomes painful.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#476

Post by _w1tm »

munksbeer wrote: post #465
radicalbyte wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a nice way of testing a language - I download a couple of projects written by beginner / mid-level developers and not having commercial dependencies and see how much effort it takes to get them running. Python is one of the worst performers (and Java is shockingly bad too, although a lot of that is down to the way the JVM/language have been mismanaged). At least unless you're comparing it to very low-level lan…

> and Java is shockingly bad too, although a lot of that is down to the way the JVM/language have been mismanaged This is interesting and not what I would expect. Generally to get a java app running from github you'd install the correct JDK and that should be about it. Many projects will use maven, which will know how to obtain dependencies. Could you describe a typical issue?

Does Maven come bundled with the SDK?

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#477

Post by _xiaz »

lairv wrote: post #105

Go is everything I don’t want in a language for my personal projects. It’s verbose, every simple task feels like a lot to write. It’s not expressive, what would be a one-liner in Python makes you write three for loops in Go. I constantly need to find workarounds for the lack of proper enums, lack of sum types, no null safety etc. I’m sure these are the exact reasons why Go is good for enterprise software, but for per…

I'm in the same boat. I believe it's a matter of taste mostly. We prefer expressiveness and power, other prefer simplicity of semantics and verbose code

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#478

Post by cies »

lairv wrote: post #105

Go is everything I don’t want in a language for my personal projects. It’s verbose, every simple task feels like a lot to write. It’s not expressive, what would be a one-liner in Python makes you write three for loops in Go. I constantly need to find workarounds for the lack of proper enums, lack of sum types, no null safety etc. I’m sure these are the exact reasons why Go is good for enterprise software, but for per…

> lack of proper enums, lack of sum types, no null safety etc

I miss the same for work.

I wonder how long it will take for Go to be the new PHP. Zealotism is through the roof. I read here people say "lack of proper enums, lack of sum types, no null safety" is a good thing. I read here people say "you can do anything with Go". It's simply not true, and very uninformed.

I wish everyone a good experience with their lang of choice.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#479

Post by xigoi »

kjksf wrote: post #133
lairv wrote: post #105

Go is everything I don’t want in a language for my personal projects. It’s verbose, every simple task feels like a lot to write. It’s not expressive, what would be a one-liner in Python makes you write three for loops in Go. I constantly need to find workarounds for the lack of proper enums, lack of sum types, no null safety etc. I’m sure these are the exact reasons why Go is good for enterprise software, but for per…

So you're ok with Python, which doesn't have sum types or null safety, 2 out of 3 things you say are missing in Go. In fact, Python didn't have any compile-type type until recently and compared to Go is slow and bloated. So maybe the issue is not Go's lacking some features but something entirely different.

Python is dynamically typed, so everything is a sum type.

Re: Go is my hammer, and everything is a nail

#480

Post by _xiaz »

sedatk wrote: post #275
bitbasher wrote: post #205

Life is barely long enough to get good at one thing so you should choose your thing wisely. That's wisdom I've held for quite some time. Coincidentally, I chose Go as my language of choice as well. The factors that led me to that choice were many, but to highlight some: - incredible standard library - simple to read and write - single static binary builds (assets included, like html/images, etc) - don't need a contai…

I chose C# for the same reasons. It's probably easier to make C# unreadable than Go due to plethora of features, but it all comes down to how you discipline yourself about writing code.

The whole issue of readability is overstated and can be reduced to familiarity with syntax and idioms
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