Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

Post by aabdi » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

za3faran wrote: post #454

aabdi wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh at the very least Java is bad. the java programs we run take 4 gigs and burn my entire compute. Every1 used spring or guice and the di runtime, so tests are expensive for e2e with mocks. There’s no scrutable way I can run more than 2 or 3 on a standard laptop without burning out the thing. Go can.

That could be a Spring issue then, not Java. Do you run with -Xmx specified?

Post by pmarreck » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #236

pmarreck wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What did you search? If I do the simplest possible thing that isn't a single word, by highlighting "opinionated formatter these days (e.g. Black)" and clicking search, I get the right result. I also get the right result for black formatter, and I get the right result if I yolo the entire comment as my search.

Post by cookiengineer » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

aktau wrote: post #497

cookiengineer wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With unit tests you gotta be careful though, oftentimes LLMs skip implementations with mockups that just say "not implemented yet" or similar and then the unit tests become pointless because they start to only test internal structures for being set / not default values. For me it helped a lot to try to make containerized end-to-end tests and a custom TestMain for this, where I am using podman to run the integration t…

+1, I like to test in a similar way. For example if I'm making a CLI, the test will spawn the CLI for each test-case, instead of invoking the code directly. This provides a more realistic flow, and makes it clear which user journeys one is supporting. Faking responses I often do with environment variables, like: ts := httptest.NewServer(...) cmd := exec.Command(...) cmd.Env = append(os.Environ(), fmt.Sprintf("MYCLI_P…

Post by qlte » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #382

My calculus is very simple these days: If I care about performance, use Rust. If I care about iteration speed, use TypeScript. If I want a script or numerical code, use Python. LLMs are better with Rust because the more expressive type system provides stronger guardrails especially when writing multithreaded code. Go is almost the worst conceivable design of a programming language for LLMs: powerful but weak guardrai…

  > If I want a script or numerical code, use Python.

Post by throwaway63467 » Wed, Aug 12, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #489

throwaway63467 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not panicking doesn’t mean working as intended, the biggest issue with LLM generated code is that it will do something that’s subtly wrong not that it will crash. It anything LLMs are too careful with Golang code and litter useless nil checks everywhere e.g. for function calls with pointer receivers. That whole fear of panics is totally overblown.

Sure, rust has better memory safety than most languages, but it also has a strong enough type system that many other kinds of programming errors won't pass compilation.