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Go's Sweet 16

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Re: Go's Sweet 16

#41

Post by tptacek »

Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I know they say that your programming language isn't the bottleneck, but I remember sitting there being frustrated as a young dev that I couldn't parse faster in the languages I was using when I learned about Go. It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them) I'm…

I don't understand the framing you have here, of Rust being an asymptote of language capability. It isn't. It's its own set of tradeoffs. In 2025, it would not make much sense to write a browser in Go. But there are a lot of network services it doesn't really make sense to write in Rust: you give up a lot (colored functions, the borrow checker) to avoid GC and goroutines.

Rust is great. One of the stupidest things in modern programming practice is the slapfight between these two language communities.

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#42

Post by zer00eyz »

Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I know they say that your programming language isn't the bottleneck, but I remember sitting there being frustrated as a young dev that I couldn't parse faster in the languages I was using when I learned about Go. It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them) I'm…

I write a lot of Go, a bit of Rust, and Zig is slowly creeping in.

To add to the above comment, a lot of what Go does encourages readability... Yes it feels pedantic at moments (error handling), but those cultural, and stylistic elements that seem painful to write make reading better.

Portable binaries are a blessing, fast compile times, and the choices made around 3rd party libraries and vendoring are all just icing on the cake.

That 80 percent feeling is more than just the language, as written, its all the things that come along with it...

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#43

Post by kasperset »

I am not really familiar with Go but I wonder where it would be without Google's support and maintenance. I have no doubt it is a solid language with some really smart people in programming language design behind it. It is so much easy to release programming language but so much difficult to maintain and curate it over time.

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#45

Post by metaltyphoon »

kermatt wrote: post #36
roncesvalles wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time: gotchas, concurrency stuff, everything. There is something very comforting about knowing the entire spec of a language. I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++, and inevitably you'll come across some obscure thing and have to context switch out of reading code to learn whatever the fuck a "part…

> I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++ How would the proportion of humans that understand all of Rust compare?

Rust isn’t that complicated if you have some background in non GC languages.

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#46

Post by cratermoon »

morshu9001 wrote: post #24
roncesvalles wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time: gotchas, concurrency stuff, everything. There is something very comforting about knowing the entire spec of a language. I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++, and inevitably you'll come across some obscure thing and have to context switch out of reading code to learn whatever the fuck a "part…

This is also what I like about JS, except it's even easier than Go. Meanwhile Python has a surprising number of random features.

https://jsdate.wtf/

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#47

Post by nicodjimenez »

Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but doesn't make sense for most applications because it complicates the development experience unnecessarily and monoliths are also easier to debug.

I would not use Golang for a big codebase with lots of business logic. Golang has not made a dent in Java usage at big companies, no large company is going to try replacing their Java codebases with Golang because there's no benefit, Java is almost as fast as Golang and has classes and actually has a richer set of concurrency primitives.

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#48

Post by wanderlust123 »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #47

Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but…

I think lack of classes is highly desirable. So much enterprise code is poorly put together abstractions.

I think go needs some more functional aspects, like iterators and result type/pattern matching.

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#49

Post by llmexperience »

morshu9001 wrote: post #24
roncesvalles wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time: gotchas, concurrency stuff, everything. There is something very comforting about knowing the entire spec of a language. I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++, and inevitably you'll come across some obscure thing and have to context switch out of reading code to learn whatever the fuck a "part…

This is also what I like about JS, except it's even easier than Go. Meanwhile Python has a surprising number of random features.

[flagged]

Re: Go's Sweet 16

#50

Post by throw1111221 »

Xeoncross wrote: post #3

I know they say that your programming language isn't the bottleneck, but I remember sitting there being frustrated as a young dev that I couldn't parse faster in the languages I was using when I learned about Go. It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them) I'm…

Well that's good, since Go was specifically designed for juniors.

From Rob Pike himself: "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."

However, the main design goal was to reduce build times at Google. This is why unused dependencies are a compile time error.

https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_6.

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