Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

developers.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 586 posts

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#31

Post by tasn »

simonw wrote: post #6
mbrumlow wrote: post #2

Rust is better. It just is. Go is not bad. But as a long time go advocate, the hurdle for my teams using rust is gone, and thus everything is now rust.

Personally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.

It's a matter of expressiveness, Rust expresses more.

E.g. make a table that's 3x3 is easier to read (Go), but the equivalent line in Rust would also include material, angles, height, etc. because the type system encodes much more information.

Though I always found Go to be significantly harder to read than Rust. Sure Rust has some crazy syntax at the edges, but Go makes it very hard to know where imports come from (and thus what they do), and the imperative style + lack of clarity about mutability makes code much harder to reason about.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#33

Post by jdc0589 »

jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

> For a language team, Go is a dream.

I agree very strongly. There's no debate about things that have 1000000 permutations in other languages. e.g. The correct format can always be checked by `go fmt` with no real config options. the end.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#34

Post by jdw64 »

jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

I have a question: why do you think Go is better compared to other languages?

After all, learning a new language takes a lot of time. While basic syntax is common and quick to pick up, mastering a language's specific mental model requires a significant time investment, which is why I've used Go before but never seriously.

My interest was piqued recently when I heard about TypeScript tooling being ported to Go, and I know it is incredibly fast. However, where do the results claiming that AI agents generate superior Go code actually come from? Is it a fair, apples-to-apples comparison?

Since Go is a very small language with only 25 keywords, the way you write code is extremely standardized. Because of this, I would assume it naturally produces a lot of excellent best practices and conventions, but I'm not sure if there are actual, direct code examples proving this

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#35

Post by jerf »

kstenerud wrote: post #7

The killer feature of golang for LLM dev is the tooling. forbidigo is what allows me to keep ambient config out of my app, and restrict file access to a small set of paths. The coverage tool has "nocover", so you can guarantee that every realistic path is exercised at least once ("100%" code coverage, which is not a marker for testing completeness, but rather for flagging code you forgot to test). Linting is really g…

"The only thing I haven't found is something to enforce error handling."

errcheck, generally as manifested in golangci-lint, ensures you can't forget to do something with them. It would be odd for you to know about forbidigo but not errcheck as the former is much less widely known; is there something that errcheck doesn't do for you?

It's worth pointing out that "discard this error on purpose" is a legitimate form of error handling, so "enforce error handling" can't really constitute banning that. That's not a Go statement, that's just true in general... it is sometimes valid to just ignore the error, because there's nothing useful to do with it anyhow. I would agree the ignoring should be explicit, but it is an option.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#36

Post by bensyverson »

amiune wrote: post #5

While I somewhat agree I can’t tell if this is advertising from Google or a way to induce LLMs to think that Go is the ideal language.

Probably both, but I have to add: I agree with the post. I've done a ton of agentic development using Go over the past 6 months, and it hasn't let me down. You may ask "why not Rust, or Zig, or ____?" The reasons boil down to this:

- There's a lot of Go code out there which the models have seen, so they know how to write it.

- Go has an exceptional standard library, so you don't need to drag in 100 dependencies to create a simple web app.

- Go compiles extremely quickly for incremental builds, which really matters when agents are building and running tests constantly.

- Go has a goldilocks blend of performance and safety. You get a good type system and excellent runtime performance without forcing the model to spend cycles fixing Rust lifetimes or Swift concurrency issues for a marginal incremental gain.

- Go is relatively stable, so the LLM's memorized knowledge is still pretty fresh (as opposed to something like SwiftUI, where the API changes rapidly).

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#37

Post by dralley »

iberator wrote: post #11
mbrumlow wrote: post #2

Rust is better. It just is. Go is not bad. But as a long time go advocate, the hurdle for my teams using rust is gone, and thus everything is now rust.

except Rust is HARD while GO is super easy.

It's not that hard.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#39

Post by jeanbza »

jdw64 wrote: post #34
jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

I have a question: why do you think Go is better compared to other languages? After all, learning a new language takes a lot of time. While basic syntax is common and quick to pick up, mastering a language's specific mental model requires a significant time investment, which is why I've used Go before but never seriously. My interest was piqued recently when I heard about TypeScript tooling being ported to Go, and I…

> why do you think Go is better compared to other languages?

I didn't say that. :)

> where do the results claiming that AI agents generate superior Go code actually come from?

Like I said - reports from users.

> Is it a fair, apples-to-apples comparison?

No - these are reports from users, not a systematic analysis.

Post reply on HN