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Go is a good fit for agents

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Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go still has a much better concurrency story. It’s also much less of a headache to deploy since all you need to deploy is a static binary and not a whole bespoke Python runtime with every pip dependency.

Go is definitely better, but with uv you can install all dependencies including python with only curl

Is that what uv sync does under the hood, just curl’s over all dependencies and the python version defined in .python-version?

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#62
Every single feature of an "agent" they have described is just...generic software development. Writing loops. if/else statements to branch execution paths. Waiting on input. Spawning child processes and communicating with them. Running CPU-bound operations (like parsing).

So every discussion about the "best" programming language is really you telling the world about your favorite language.

Use Go. Use Python. Use JavaScript. Use whatever the hell else you want. They are all good enough for the job. If you are held back it won't be because of the language itself.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#63
It is not. Human coding languages and paradigms revolve around solving problems related to issues that human struggle with. We need AI coding languages that are easy to read and verify by humans, but should solve problems that AI agents struggle with.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#64
Erlang is a way better fit for a distributed agent orchestration layer. You have a ton of dependencies, over network and maybe in userspace, you have a lot of inter-operability and reliability constraints, you want to hotswap code and capabilities at runtime, without degrading the overall system performance. And you get networking/distribution/async message passing for free

https://github.com/arthurcolle/agents.erl

I consider myself an expert in this relatively niche domain and welcome follow up, critiques, and even your most challenging problems. I love this area and I think distributed systems are coming back in a big way in this new era!

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#65
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A uniform language and ecosystem has been the siren song of JS for over a decade and I've yet to see it work out in any meaningful way. Use whatever you like.

I mean, what else do you use to run things in the browser? Pouchdb. Hypercore (pear). It’s nice to be able to spin up JS versions of things and have them “just work” in the most widely deployed platform in the world. TensorflowJS was awesome for years, with things like blazeface, readyplayer me avatars and hallway tile and other models working in realtime at the edge. Before chatgpt was even conceived. What’s your so…

> what else do you use to run things in the browser?

I do my best to run as little in the browser as possible. Everything is an order of magnitude simpler and faster to build if you do the bulk of things on a server in a language of your choice and render to the browser as necessary.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#66
post #62

Every single feature of an "agent" they have described is just...generic software development. Writing loops. if/else statements to branch execution paths. Waiting on input. Spawning child processes and communicating with them. Running CPU-bound operations (like parsing). So every discussion about the "best" programming language is really you telling the world about your favorite language. Use Go. Use Python. Use Jav…

For an agent that executes locally, or an agent that doesn't execute very often, I'd agree it's arbitrary.

But programming languages make tradeoffs on those very paths (particularly spawning child processes and communicating with them, how underlying memory is accessed and modified, garbage collection).

Agents often involve a specific architecture that's useful for a language with powerful concurrency features. These features differentiate the language as you hit scale.

Not every language is equally suited to every task.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#69

Erlang is a way better fit for a distributed agent orchestration layer. You have a ton of dependencies, over network and maybe in userspace, you have a lot of inter-operability and reliability constraints, you want to hotswap code and capabilities at runtime, without degrading the overall system performance. And you get networking/distribution/async message passing for free https://github.com/arthurcolle/agents.erl I…

I came here to say that too.

It already does well coordinating IoT networks. It's probably one of the most underestimated systems.

The Elixir community has been working hard to be able to run models directly within BEAM, and recently, have added the capability for running Python directly.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#70
Rust is a way better option, not sure why it isn't being mentioned.

The issue with Go, is as soon as you need to do actual machine learning it falls down.

The issue with Python is that you often want concurrency in agents. Although this may be solved with Pythons new threading.

Why is Rust great? It interops very well with Python, so you can write any concurrent pieces into that and simply import it into py, without needing to sacrifice any ML work.

I'll be honest Go is a bit of an odd fit in the world of AI, and if thats the future I'm not sure Go has a big part to play outside of some infra stuff.

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