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Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#11

Post by jalino23 »

bheadmaster wrote: post #8

1. Static linking. I'm astonished by how many languages expect the end user to install dependencies/runtime themselves, and something about it feels very impure . 2. The "go" keyword (and the whole goroutine system underneath it). Threads are clunky, somewhat unportable and generally unscalable. Goroutines just feel right. 3. Ability to use multiple major versions of a library. Diamond dependencies are an unsolved pr…

1. Static linking. I agree with this, coming from JS to learning C, and having difficult time compiling things.

3. Implicit interfaces. I'm in love with this idea when I learned of it. however it wasnt obvious that this should be a thing. if you learned interface from other languages first

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#13

Post by yzsh »

Like: 1. Expansive Stdlib: it’s great to know there’s a working library I can rely on that will have long term investment for most things 2. Compile times are fast 3. Readable libraries. It’s pretty easy to folllow go library code Dislike: 1. Interface{} and gotos. They are easily avoidable in production code, but they open up some weaknesses in working with third parties. 2. Error handling. It should be a compile error not to handle a Retuned error without an _.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#15

Post by pjmlp »

fwsgonzo wrote: post #7

For me Go is unique in that it can produce a fully static binary that can fetch from a HTTPS endpoint. It also supports many architectures. On top of that the package system and it's just way more convenient to use than other languages. Easy to learn, easy to put somewhere in practice. Not every program has to be 100% safe and delivering 2M req/s. Sometimes you just want to build a program once and ship it. What othe…

Static linking predates dynamic linking by several decades, hardly unique.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#16

Post by hinoki »

As someone who likes async/await/coroutines, I really miss them in Go. Channels are the GOTO of synchronisation, they lead to confusing spaghetti code because there is no structure.

Go is really nice to read (once you get used to the fact that half the lines of code in any function are for error handling) unless it uses a lot of channels. Then you need to take great care to understand every <-.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#17

Post by ubaltaci »

Like: get things done mentality, green threads, duck typing, default formatter.

Dislike: still no easy way to dynamically create mocks -maybe some brave soul will try to solve it after generics :)- I don't like code generation or manual mocking, we have a large codebase, 1000+ file and so much noise in the repo because of generated mocks. And yes we are fan of unit tests and aiming 100% coverage on business logic.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#18

Post by pjmlp »

What I like,

It is a nice language had it been released in the mid-90's, following the footsteps of Oberon and Limbo.

What I dislike,

Being designed a decade later ignoring everything that happened in mainstream computing since Oberon and Limbo came to be, then adopting features that weren't properly backed in from the get go.

Re: Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Golang?

#20

Post by closeparen »

Pro:

- Community. Pragmatic, high signal to noise ratio in online resources, little magic, sympathetic to the needs of production operations. Consider for example httptrace [0]. This kind of introspection isn't even normally possible in many languages and their library ecosystems. In Go world, people care about this stuff.

- Standard library. High quality and flexible packages for stuff like web servers and clients, TLS certificate manipulation, SQL, various data encodings, etc.

- AST package, strong first-party support for manipulating Go source files.

- Table driven testing norm is very cool in certain circumstances.

Con:

- Verbosity. Something like making an HTTP request is ~7 different operations, each with their own error branches.

- The tedium of meeting coverage mandates. Having to code-generate tons of mocks and type out very elaborate test tables for what feels more like busywork than genuine confidence-building. Partly this is my employer's fault for having high coverage standards though.

- Despite its apparent simplicity, there are significant footguns lying around slices, loop variable captures, channel deadlocks, etc.

- The Go community's solution to a lot of language shortcomings (verbosity, type system, etc) is code generation. For example, we have an internal framework for parallel task graph execution, which is much safer and cleaner than manually managing channels and goroutines. But this kind of thing cannot be expressed as a regular library like it would be in other languages.

- Despite the prevalance of code generation, Go does not quite have a macro system, leading to third-party build systems like Bazel in companies that do a lot of code generation with their Go. This then leads to rough edges with the other tools' handling of "de-materialized" generated code and the need for stuff like GOPACKAGESDRIVER for proper editor support. Editor and debugger support for generated code, the way things stand, can be rough.

- Certain syntax rules such as trailing commas and unused variables/imports (especially when commenting stuff out temporarily to debug something!) can get on my nerves.

[0] https://pkg.go.dev/net/http/httptrace@go1.19.3

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