I wonder if this is why there's been a huge uptick in the visibility of Go related content. I've seen more posts about Go in the last few days then I had in the last year.
A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
121–130 of 310 posts
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#122I've been saying this for maybe nine months vis-à-vis my consulting work keeps proving it. Go is an excellent language for LLM code generation. There exists a large stable training corpus, one way to write it, one build system, one formatter, static typing, CSP concurrency that doesn't have C++ footguns. The language hasn't had a breaking version in over a decade. There's minimal framework churn. When I advise teams…
Most of these reasons apply to Java as much, if not more. It's an even more popular language with even more training data and also has a better type system so more validation on LLM output, etc.
I wonder what people will say to that.
I personally think neither Go nor Java would be good for "agents". Better to have them sandboxed in WASM.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Isn’t dependent types replicating the object oriented inheritance problem in the type system?
No, unless you mean the problem of over-engineering? In which case, yes, that is a realistic concern. In the real world, tests are quite often more than good enough. And since they are good enough they end up covering all the same cases a half-assed type system is able to assert anyway by virtue of the remaining logic needing to be tested, so the type system doesn't become all that important in the first place.
A half-assed type system is helpful for people writing code by hand. Then you get things like the squiggly lines in your editor and automated refactoring tools, which are quite beneficial for productivity. However, when an LLM is writing code none of that matters. It doesn't care one bit if the failure reports comes from the compiler or the test suite. It is all the same to it.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#124Yeah, I don't care for go but I expect it to win here. Its performance is good enough for most use cases, it has a huge ecosystem of libraries, lots of training data, and deploys as a binary so users don't need to install anything else. I expect rust to gain some market share since it's safe and fast, with a better type system, but complex enough that many developers would struggle by themselves. But IME AI also stru…
> But for whatever reason it never became that mainstream
Syntax. Syntax is the reason. It's too foreign to be picked up quickly by the mass of developers that already know a C style language. I would also argue that it's not only foreign, it's too clunky.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#125I've been saying this for maybe nine months vis-à-vis my consulting work keeps proving it. Go is an excellent language for LLM code generation. There exists a large stable training corpus, one way to write it, one build system, one formatter, static typing, CSP concurrency that doesn't have C++ footguns. The language hasn't had a breaking version in over a decade. There's minimal framework churn. When I advise teams…
Most of these reasons apply to Java as much, if not more. It's an even more popular language with even more training data and also has a better type system so more validation on LLM output, etc.
Except that Go is a simpler, smaller language than Java. That's one of the key points in the post.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#126[deleted]
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#127I've been saying this for maybe nine months vis-à-vis my consulting work keeps proving it. Go is an excellent language for LLM code generation. There exists a large stable training corpus, one way to write it, one build system, one formatter, static typing, CSP concurrency that doesn't have C++ footguns. The language hasn't had a breaking version in over a decade. There's minimal framework churn. When I advise teams…
> But LLMs don't care about expressiveness, they care about predictability. I think this is true, but it misses a very key point. Go does an impressively bad job at designing APIs that are difficult to misuse, so LLMs will misuse them and will require also writing unit tests to walk through it, just to validate it used the libraries correctly. This isn't always possible (or is awkward/cumbersome) for certain scenario…
Rust is unstable and slow to compile. I think these two features make it bad for LLMs and everything else.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#128I've been saying this for maybe nine months vis-à-vis my consulting work keeps proving it. Go is an excellent language for LLM code generation. There exists a large stable training corpus, one way to write it, one build system, one formatter, static typing, CSP concurrency that doesn't have C++ footguns. The language hasn't had a breaking version in over a decade. There's minimal framework churn. When I advise teams…
A lot of those pros apply to c# as well. Which claude and gemeni both do very well with.
Or Java, for that matter.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#129I think the more you can shift to compile time the better when it comes to agents. Go is therefore 'ok', but the type system isn't as useful as other options. I would say Rust is quite good for just letting something churn through compiler errors until it works, and then you're unlikely to get runtime errors. I haven't tried Haskell, but I assume that's even better.
I think Rust is great for agents, for a reason that is rarely mentioned: unit tests are in the same file. This means that agents just "know" they should update the tests along with the source. With other languages, whether it's TypeScript/Go/Python, even if you explicitly ask agents to write/run tests, after a while agents just forget to do that, unless they cause build failures. You have to constantly remind them to…
Unit tests in the same file wastes context and makes the whole thing hard to navigate for humans and machines alike.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#130I think the more you can shift to compile time the better when it comes to agents. Go is therefore 'ok', but the type system isn't as useful as other options. I would say Rust is quite good for just letting something churn through compiler errors until it works, and then you're unlikely to get runtime errors. I haven't tried Haskell, but I assume that's even better.
I absolutely love Rust, but due to the space it occupies there is simply more to specify in code, and more things to get wrong for a stochastic LLM.
Lifetimes are a global property and LLMs are not particularly good at reasoning about them compared to local ones.
Most applications don't need low level memory control, so this complexity is better pushed to runtime.
There are lots of managed languages with good/even stronger type systems than Rust, paired with a good modern GC.