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Official Go support

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Re: Official Go support

#21

Post by loudmax »

fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

Go was originally pitched as a better C, but it seems to be finding a niche as a better Python or possibly a better Java. Go binaries have built-in GC, and Go will probably never reach C levels of performance. There is a lot to like about Go and it is working out very well for a lot of people, but it isn't appropriate for every situation.

If you want a better C, better to look into Rust: http://www.rust-lang.org/

Re: Official Go support

#23

Post by mseepgood »

schmichael wrote: post #14
fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

The comparison to C has always struck me as strange. It has curly braces and pointers, but few semicolons, no pointer arithmetic, garbage collection, and tons of high level language primitives (maps, slices, channels, select, goroutines, a userland scheduler). Many people, myself included, find it a wonderful language suitable for all sorts of service development whether it's data processing systems or web APIs.

I would say it shares some design philosophy with C: simple, "New Jersey style", imperative, pragmatic, non-generic, explicit control flow.

Re: Official Go support

#24

Post by NateDad »

fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

Go is a very pleasant language to develop software products in.

Unlike the dynamically typed languages, it doesn't trade speed for beauty of syntax. This means that sometimes syntax can be a little non-uniform, but there's always a reason. Unlike C and C++, it doesn't trade safety for speed of execution. There are no buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Go applications. It treads a fine line of where to let the language do the lifting and where to make you do it. In general, it does a really good job of finding the pragmatic side of the line to sit on in any particular situation.

I don't know of any widely used C garbage collection libraries. The benefit of it being a language-level is that everyone uses it, which means your code works the same as everyone else's, so you can easily just reuse other people's code, without having to restrict your search to some small subset of repos that use your particular GC Library.

Also, in Go, unlike most other garbage-collected languages, there is a stack, and you can pretty easily write code that only uses memory from the stack, and never needs to run GC.

Finally, Go's tooling is really phenomenal. Testing, doc generation, performance reporting, code coverage, linting, package distribution, code formatting, refactoring, cross-platform compiling, and soon, pre-processing, are all built-in and really well done.

Re: Official Go support

#25

Post by chc »

fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

A C garbage collection library generally has to be very conservative because most C code is written with the assumption of not being garbage-collected. Having GC built in allows you to do more aggressive collection without worrying about breaking code that assumes it has precise control over memory. There's a reason why even people who like garbage collection don't tend to use garbage collection when they write C.

Re: Official Go support

#27

Post by jff »

loudmax wrote: post #21
fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

Go was originally pitched as a better C, but it seems to be finding a niche as a better Python or possibly a better Java. Go binaries have built-in GC, and Go will probably never reach C levels of performance. There is a lot to like about Go and it is working out very well for a lot of people, but it isn't appropriate for every situation. If you want a better C, better to look into Rust: http://www.rust-lang.org/

Rust looks a lot more like a slightly more sane C++, given the proliferation of Someclass::Somethingelse

Re: Official Go support

#28

Post by kyrra »

fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

The Golang FAQ will help answer your questions about some of their design principles[0]. Rob Pike also has some interesting views on why Go seems to attract Python and Ruby devs rather than C and C++ devs[1].

[0] https://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_purpose_of_the_projec...

[1] http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponentia...

Re: Official Go support

#29

Post by pcwalton »

jff wrote: post #27
loudmax wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go was originally pitched as a better C, but it seems to be finding a niche as a better Python or possibly a better Java. Go binaries have built-in GC, and Go will probably never reach C levels of performance. There is a lot to like about Go and it is working out very well for a lot of people, but it isn't appropriate for every situation. If you want a better C, better to look into Rust: http://www.rust-lang.org/

Rust looks a lot more like a slightly more sane C++, given the proliferation of Someclass::Somethingelse

Rust doesn't have classes.

Re: Official Go support

#30

Post by kyrra »

NateDad wrote: post #24
fizixer wrote: post #11

Can someone explain? I'm a big fan of C and python and I've never used Go. My initial impressions from readings were that Go is a better C. But then I came across a Go person who was lamenting that misunderstanding and that Go is python but with better performance. What's it all about? Also even if we compare it to C I don't like the garbage-collection thing at system level. Also what does Go let you do in terms of g…

Go is a very pleasant language to develop software products in. Unlike the dynamically typed languages, it doesn't trade speed for beauty of syntax. This means that sometimes syntax can be a little non-uniform, but there's always a reason. Unlike C and C++, it doesn't trade safety for speed of execution. There are no buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Go applications. It treads a fine line of where to let the languag…

The toolchain part of Go is very interesting (I only know the basics). Go doesn't use GCC, LLVM or other existing compilers. Go's compiler/linker originated from the Plan9 C compiler (that Rob and Ken worked on)[0]. Because of this, it allows you to create binaries for any target platform from any platform you have the Go toolchain on. So from my OSX macbook, I can compile Windows and Linux executables.

When you start diving into it a a bit more, you'll see that Go has it's own ASM language[1] that your code is first compiled into (which then can be translated into specific os/platform asm).

This has it's own ups and downs. Debuggers don't work all that well on Go generated executables (gdb is the closest, even that one isn't all that great). You also don't have the years of optimizations that GCC and LLVM bring to the table. But the Go team has tight control of the tools, which allow for quick compilation and allow them to pick their own direction.

[0] https://golang.org/cmd/gc/

[1] https://golang.org/doc/asm

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