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Go and Assembly

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21–30 of 127 posts

Re: Go and Assembly

#21
post #13
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[[[EDIT: wrote this little rant before realizing you specifically refer to HN search rather than general search. Yeah why would I ever search on a specific Go topic exclusively on HN, instead of web-searching?]]] Every time a Go article comes up, the "name searchability" discussion comes up. Go's been around for some 4-5 years now, can we all come to terms with its name? Somehow whenever brainfuck-lang threads show u…

Your examples make no real sense, other than "Basic". Perl is absolutely NOT a common word. Pearl is common, but Perl is the programming language (only)

In fact I have heard from Larry Wall that one of the things he liked about the name Perl was that he could easily grep a Usenet feed for the term. That let him keep track of every mention of Perl back in the early days.

I think it is too bad that in the days of Google and the web there is no easy way to keep track of all new references to an uncommon term like that.

Re: Go and Assembly

#22
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case there is a 386 implementation: http://golang.org/src/pkg/math/remainder_386.s The other two call the go version: http://golang.org/src/pkg/math/remainder.go

Yeah that was kinda my point ;)) so basically 386 users get some highly specialized hand-tuned asm optimization whereas arm and amd64 merely get a commoner's gc treatment -- or am I missing something? ;)

Yep. I would guess the compiler produced sufficiently optimized code for the other platforms.

Very little of the Go standard library is written in anything but Go.

Re: Go and Assembly

#23
post #18
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java, Python, Ruby, Lua, Haskell. All names which the programming language is one of the last things a search engine would normally associate, but by sheer number of hits you end up finding stuff. When they were invented these names weren't good either. The discussion about Go's name is indeed useless.

There's a crucial difference. Those are longer words. Many search engines either ignore, or outright throw an error on, search terms shorter than 3/4 characters.

I think the most damning part is that 'go' is a common verb.

Re: Go and Assembly

#24

And herein lies the problem with Go. Seriously, try searching for articles about Go on HN. People always say "well the name isn't a problem, because you just search for it with "golang" instead!" but no one writes golang unless they're pointing out how to search for it . If I was trying to get back to this article a month from now and I searched for "go", would I find it? Probably not, unless I remembered the article…

According to golang FAQ, the origin of the name is that, “Ogle” would be a good name for a Go debugger. [1]

I just came up the idea: why didn't they name the language "Goo", and leave "Gle" to the debugger? It would be more common for people to refer to the language itself than to its debugger.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_origin_of_the_name

Re: Go and Assembly

#25
post #19
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

zOMG you're right re pearl -- I'm kinda shocked at myself right now. In my defense, in German it's "Perle" so not that different... OK scratch the Perl example. Still standing by my point: it's a "problem" shared by many languages and it's not a problem in the first place.

I found a list of English words by frequecy of use in Project Gutenberg texts. "Basic" is around #9,500. "Rust" is ~#10,950 "Java" doesn't appear at all (List goes out to 40,000) (Admittedly, somewhat biased by the dated-ness of the material, but it's still not a common one.) Go is #106, and modern lists based on contemporary sources place it in the top 50 most used English words.

http://norvig.com/mayzner.html

(1MB) word count list: http://norvig.com/google-books-common-words.txt

Go: 187, Basic: 759, Java: 7136, Rust: 13110

With relative frequencies 320M:103M:8.9M:3.6M ~ 100:30:3:1

Re: Go and Assembly

#26
post #16

Except for his bullet about compiler speed, which might be faster than GHC, all of his bullets apply to GHC Haskell too.

Wait, even "Go comes with a complete set of documentation available from the command line". I use hoogle from the command line, is there anything else for Haskell?

Re: Go and Assembly

#27

And herein lies the problem with Go. Seriously, try searching for articles about Go on HN. People always say "well the name isn't a problem, because you just search for it with "golang" instead!" but no one writes golang unless they're pointing out how to search for it . If I was trying to get back to this article a month from now and I searched for "go", would I find it? Probably not, unless I remembered the article…

>Seriously, try searching for articles about Go on HN.

Well, either "site:news.ycombinator.com go" or " "site:news.ycombinator.com golang" work very well for me, getting tons of results. What exactly was the problem again?

If you don't find as many articles on Go as you would like it's because there just aren't that many. It's a relatively new language, without much of a user base yet. Heck, it only has 3-4 books out on it.

Re: Go and Assembly

#29
post #20

Does Go only support that crazy Plan 9 (amd64) assembler syntax that nobody uses anywhere?

Well, since two of the original three developers (Pike and Thompson) were part of the Plan 9 team, it makes perfect sense that they based the compilers on the Plan 9 ones.

Re: Go and Assembly

#30
post #26
post #16

Except for his bullet about compiler speed, which might be faster than GHC, all of his bullets apply to GHC Haskell too.

Wait, even "Go comes with a complete set of documentation available from the command line". I use hoogle from the command line, is there anything else for Haskell?

Hoogle type search is great: Give a type, get back names implementing that type or a generalization of it.

There's the haddock auto-generated documentation from cabal (if you enable it). Not sure if that qualifies for "available from the command line".

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