Live data from Hacker News

Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

developers.googleblog.com

131–140 of 586 posts

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

#131
post #80

I wouldn't say Go is IDEAL for AI coding, but it certainly has the case for one of the best programming languages that currently AI uses. Go definitely has its share of problems for human authors because it's so verbose and boilerplate heavy, which means it's less of an issue with LLMs than it is for human coders. Rust is comparatively worse, because LLMs don't make the same coding mistakes that humans do that justif…

So in terms of the mainstream languages, what would you say would be the most ideal language? (At least until Oct takes off!). Perhaps modern Java? .. Or even Zig?

C#, only because of dotnet ecosystem and tooling is great. TypeScript is a dark horse candidate, it's a great language with a great ecosystem trapped by JS tooling, and most of all, NPM. Rust is fine if you just tell LLMs to use short borrows only. I wouldn't even say Oct is the most ideal language, it's pretty good at getting LLMs to do science, but probably isn't the right language for all applications.

I have some very heavy criticism for Zig technically, because their whole thing about "no hidden control flow" becomes "shove all the hidden control flow into a second hard to debug runtime that runs at compile time", and manual allocation for everything is incredibly tedious and hard to keep track of in production code. I mean, C++ wasn't ALL wrong, there was a reason that templates exist in the first place, and having the entire generics model be just comptime isn't really a decision I agree with. The way I see it, Zig would probably find a niche as a language that configs C/C++ codebase at compile time instead of the C replacement they want it to be.

There are two more languages I have in the Oct repo, SDSL-V for SPIR-V shader/compute kernel authoring and Concept/Vulkan because the 20k line C Vulkan Prometheus runtime for GPU compute that we built is getting kind of unmaintainable even by AI that making up a new programming language to strangler fig refactor it is honestly the least bad option.

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

#132
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it better than zig if you are outputting minimal wasm deliverables? Which tradeoffs are you willing to accept? Zig (along with several other languages) is superior in a lot of ways for that type of job, but I still settled on Go for a particular minimal WASM (browser) project. It wasn't my first choice, but it was where I ended up because LLMs kept going out to lunch in other languages and I didn't have anywhere…

the Go runtime comes along for the ride when producing a wasm file, if you are interested in "minimal" (as in small or without extra cruft) then languages that do not require such a thing might be more adequate

Tinygo's base runtime is only around 10kb. It was minimal enough for my needs. gc's runtime would have been a non-starter for that task, to be fair, but Go isn't an implementation. It is, quite explicitly, a language.

There are language implementations that would have been more minimal than that, sure, but there was no obvious way to get LLMs into alignment. I tried. Multiple times. When I switched to Go, it just worked. It may not be technical perfection, but it let me ship something I had almost given up on and it has satisfied users. The tradeoff was worthwhile for my needs. That tradeoff may not be acceptable in all cases. Hence what is best being meaningless without at least defining which tradeoffs you are willing to accept.

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

#133

I'd argue Go is not on a "Pareto frontier" and that no matter how you value the various attributes of programming languages, a fair assessment will never select Go. A simple example is: if you highly value language popularity; Go is not most popular. If you highly value a type system that catches errors; Go's type system catches fewer errors than others. Etc. There is no weighted sum of attributes that will select Go…

Is there a language that you would argue is at least as good as Go at everything and better than Go in at least one thing? That would be the most straightforward way to argue against its Pareto optimality.

Listing particular sets of preferences for which Go is not optimal is not sufficient unless you can show the list to be exhaustive.

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

#134
I really don't agree. I'm not hear to evangelize rust but by using enums from DB to templates and writing the code to make it consistent my experience with LLMs is infinitely better than golang for consistency and you have to include a lot more context to make golang work without issues whenever things are operating on chans or workgroups.

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

#135
In my opinion, the by far biggest problem Go has is called ...

Google.

Now one can say that a programming language and its design or usefulness is - or should be - decoupled from the company developing is. I am not opposed to this, in theory, but Google goes way too much on my nerves these days. And I am hardly the only one here.

I am not saying this is a rationale used by many other people either, mind you, but Rust has been taking strides (not that I am a huge fan of it either but for different reasons) and it seems to me as if Rust has finally now more momentum than Go, which I find interesting. Again, this may be a correlation rather than any causation, but I can not help but notice it.

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

#138

I love the sleight of hand this blog post tries to pull off here. It doesn't matter than Go isn't fun to write because the AI is doing it now! Yeah so it sucked for the last twenty years? I know the main thesis is that Go is holistically good at software engineering so its weakness as a programming language is minimized. I've made a similar arguments that coding agents push the burden more into the other aspects of s…

I agree with you here and I think you raise several good points, such as "Go's weakness transmutes into a strength" (allegedly). Indeed that makes no sense for Google to try to claim that.

Your other point is even more interesting, e. g. "before AI, Go sucked and nobody used it" - now this may be an exaggeration or simplification, but it is a great observation nonetheless, because Google suddenly tries to connect Go with the rise of AI, almost as if AI could not have risen without Go, which is indeed very strange as an argument to make by Google here. This also reminds me of Google promoting Dart/Flutter before giving up on this and preparing to send it (eventually) to the infamous Google graveyard at some point in the not-so-distant future.

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

#139
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber reported that their Go code has quantitatively more concurrency bugs than code in other languages, and while to me it seems obvious from looking at Go's concurrency model, this is backed by actual data. Is there any quantitative data to back the claim that Go is better in an LLM based workflow than another popular language?

Matches my experience as well. Go fans have conflated "can easily make something concurrent" with "does concurrency well." Go's primitives for concurrency should almost never be used directly and Engineers below a certain skill level shouldn't be allowed to use them directly ever for long running production code. As another example, Go still has not yielded a correct implementation of Raft or Paxos while there are do…

The "world" runs on Kubernetes which is using Raft: https://pkg.go.dev/go.etcd.io/etcd/raft/v3

Are you saying that this implementation is wrong?

"This Raft library is stable and feature complete. As of 2016, it is the most widely used Raft library in production, serving tens of thousands clusters each day. It powers distributed systems such as etcd, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Cloud Foundry Diego, CockroachDB, TiDB, Project Calico, Flannel, Hyperledger and more."

One of the most popular distributed DB is Cockroach which is written in go and also uses Raft: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/tree/master/pkg/raf...

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

#140
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is "Black"? (For hopefully obvious reasons, I couldn't find results with google, lol)

Black for Python https://github.com/psf/black

But you're probably better off with Ruff these days: https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/

Similar to black but faster, written in Rust, by the same team who created uv.

Post reply on HN