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Go is a good fit for agents

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Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#111

Post by carlmr »

arthurcolle wrote: post #91
guywithahat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking why would one use Erlang over Elixir?

It doesn't feel different enough to merit a difference. Elixir is just a set of Erlang macros that turn one syntax into .beam that otherwise wouldn't turn into .beam Elixir is way more productive to write/deal with (Phoenix vs. Erlang templating) maybe if you're a web dev, but at the end of the day you're dealing with the same exact same underlying architecture. If you're a prolog programmer, Erlang will feel nicer t…

>Just feels weird that Elixir gets a bunch of street cred for what are fundamentally Erlang/OTP capabilities

I know what you mean, at the same time I'm thinking we should welcome any momentum from the Elixir community. The more people working with Elixir/Erlang the better. And if you try Elixir at some point you learn about the Elixir background.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#113

Post by giik »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #112

Go's quite horrendous and limited type system makes it a poor fit for everything. The worst thing about Go is, in fact, the language. Everything except the language redeems it.

Can you elaborate a bit on how does "Go's quite horrendous and limited type system" get in the way of crafting agents?

Honest question, I am genuinely interested in what cannot be done easily or at all due to limitations of the Go type system.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#114

Post by bbkane »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #112

Go's quite horrendous and limited type system makes it a poor fit for everything. The worst thing about Go is, in fact, the language. Everything except the language redeems it.

I agree- multiple return values don't compose; errors are better than exceptions, but still super verbose; channels have a lot of foot guns; enums are just sad.

But despite all of that the language has some really good qualities too- interfaces works far better than it feels like they should; the packaging fits together really well (I'm learning Rust right now and the file structure is far more complicated); and people are able to write a lot of linters/codegen tools BECAUSE the language is so simple.

All in all I worry the least about the long term maintenance cost of my Go code, especially compared to my Python or JS code.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#115

Post by zveyaeyv3sfye »

giik wrote: post #113
flanked-evergl wrote: post #112

Go's quite horrendous and limited type system makes it a poor fit for everything. The worst thing about Go is, in fact, the language. Everything except the language redeems it.

Can you elaborate a bit on how does "Go's quite horrendous and limited type system" get in the way of crafting agents? Honest question, I am genuinely interested in what cannot be done easily or at all due to limitations of the Go type system.

It's just a uninformed hivemind comment written by someone lacking original thought.

If you are interested in the merits of golang, you should listen to someone who uses it.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#116

Post by zveyaeyv3sfye »

fixprix wrote: post #90
lunarcave wrote: post #73

Agents easily spend >90% of their time waiting for LLMs to reply and optionally executing API calls in other services (HTTP APIs and DBs). In my experience the performance of the language runtime rarely matters. If there ever was a language feature that matters for agent performance and scale, it's actually the performance of JSON serialization and deserialization.

Yep exactly, might as well use a language that works with JSON natively like TypeScript; which has arguably far more powerful type system than Go.

> like TypeScript; which has arguably far more powerful type system than Go.

"arguably".

Typescript is just a thin wrapper over javascript who doesnt have these types at all.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#117

Post by flanked-evergl »

zveyaeyv3sfye wrote: post #115
giik wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a bit on how does "Go's quite horrendous and limited type system" get in the way of crafting agents? Honest question, I am genuinely interested in what cannot be done easily or at all due to limitations of the Go type system.

It's just a uninformed hivemind comment written by someone lacking original thought. If you are interested in the merits of golang, you should listen to someone who uses it.

I used it for years.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#118

Post by Teifion »

eru wrote: post #88
guywithahat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking why would one use Erlang over Elixir?

Erlang has better syntax than Elixir. But otherwise they are mostly the same: Elixir is just an Erlang reskin. So pretty much wherever you can use one, you can use the other.

An anecdote which may be of interest. Speaking to Elixir and Erlang developers I found those who started with Erlang preferred its syntax while those who started with Elixir or didn't know either preferred the Elixir syntax.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#119

Post by samuell »

arthurcolle wrote: post #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…

While I think there is some truth to that regarding the programming paradigm, I always felt the EVM have two big drawbacks, compared to something like Go:

1. Requiring a VM, making deployment more complex.

2. Not being natively compiled, or always having this performance roof for the inner loops.

After considering both Erlang/Elixir and Go a lot for my scientific workflow manager, I finally went with Go for these exact reasons.

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#120

Post by crabmusket »

dpe82 wrote: post #24
tolerance wrote: post #4

As a functionally-code-illiterate-vibe-coder, I can confirm that LLMs are good at writing Go code.

As a highly-literate developer with almost 30 years of experience, I can also confirm that LLMs are very good at writing Go.

"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt." – Rob Pike

This fits LLMs pretty well too it seems!

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