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Just Use Go

blainsmith.com

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Re: Just Use Go

#11

Post by codegeek »

I love Go. But I prefer .NET for web development that also compiles to a binary and has a great ecosystem of libraries and packages. Go is great if standard library works (and it can for many cases) but when you need to start looking into non standard libraries, Go can hit limitations.

For example, to build a full production web application with database in Go, there is no great out of the box migration tool. There are some good 3rd party libraries of course but compared to something like EFCore in .NET, they don't come as close.

For me, it is now .NET and then Go. Of course, I use Go when just doing a lot of non web stuff as well.

Re: Just Use Go

#12

Post by treis »

There's a lot of merit in this. I call Go the Honda Odyssey Minivan of the programming world. It doesn't do anything exceptionally well but it does lots really well and in a way that's simple and reliable. Especially for the backend serving react front end niche.

But it's also a pig to write and comes with a lot of foot guns. Especially the Null handling. Somehow they made it worse than every other language.

Re: Just Use Go

#13

Post by shrubble »

Not mentioned is that Gemini does a pretty good job of writing Go in my experience of using it to generate utility scripts, and a friend’s use of generating an internal website for using a corporate API.

Re: Just Use Go

#16

Post by sudb »

Maybe some common complaints about Go are finally less of a problem in the current coding agent era - e.g. ecosystem weakness complaints and verbose error handling.

Though TypeScript's type system is maybe still more powerful - and therefore might have the edge for agents writing code? (Not to mention there's probably more TypeScript in the training data for LLMs, though perhaps there's _better quality_ Go - I'm not a Go dev though so I couldn't comment further on this.)

Re: Just Use Go

#18

Post by runarberg »

I know this is nitpicky, but whenever I see Go code I see those capitalized function or variable names and know: “aha, these were imported from another file; or will be exported later” and I think to my self: “why? oh why is that relevant information for my at this point in the code?” and I just think about what kind of a weird ill thought out design decision that was, just to save authors from writing an “export” keyword, and further judge the rest of the language predicting it must have more weird design decisions in it.
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