Go is a good fit for agents • Hacker News Board

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#181

Post by fritzo » Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #105

fritzo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the 2nd most costly function in agents (after LLM calls) is diffing/patching/merging asynchronous edits to resolve conflicts. Those conflict resolution operations can call out to low-level libraries, but they are still quite expensive optimization problems, compared to serialization etc.

What diffing/patching/merging library are you working with? Or are you building your own?

I've used google's old diff-match-patch, a faster python binding of that C++ library fast-diff-match-patch, and biopython (which amazingly supports unicode!)

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#182

Post by fritzo » Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 12:25 AM UTC

autogn0me wrote: post #81

fritzo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the 2nd most costly function in agents (after LLM calls) is diffing/patching/merging asynchronous edits to resolve conflicts. Those conflict resolution operations can call out to low-level libraries, but they are still quite expensive optimization problems, compared to serialization etc.

can you be more specific about this?

1. follow rich hickey's advice and orchestrate all llms to mutate a single shared state

2. let those llms operate asynchronously in parallel

3. when an llm wants to mutate the global state but the state has changed since it's checkout, try to safely merge changes using an expensive diff algorithm (which is still cheaper than the llm); on failure retry

Re: Go is a good fit for agents

#183

Post by rednafi » Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 6:18 PM UTC

mkfs wrote: post #167

rednafi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. JS is a terrible language to begin with, and bringing it to the backend was a mistake. TS doesn’t change the fact that the underlying language is still a pile of crap. So, like many, I’ll write anything—Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, Elixir, F#—before touching JS or TS with a ten-foot pole.

> Python, Ruby It's 2025, Node.js has been around since 2009, yet these languages' still use C-based interpreters by default, and their non-standard JIT alternatives are still much worse than V8.

Define “worse.” V8 is a runtime; it can’t fix JavaScript’s terrible design. V8 is amazing but runs a crappy language. Both Ruby and Python were created by actual language designers, and that still shows even decades after their original conception.