Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

getbruin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 310 posts

Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

#24

Post by pjcurran »

I happen to just stumble across this article https://felixbarbalet.com/simple-made-inevitable-the-economi... extolling the virtues of Clojure. It specifically calls out Go for not being simple in the ways that matter for LLMs.

I've no idea myself, I just thought it was interesting for comparison.

Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

#25

Post by justinhj »

Intuitively I expect this. Go is a language designed by Rob Pike to keep legions of high IQ Google engineers constrained down a simple path. There's generally one way to do it in Go.

As a human programmer with creative and aesthetic urges as well as being lazy and having an ego, I love expressive languages that let me describe what I want in a parsimonious fashion. ie As few lines of code as possible and no boilerplate.

With the advances in agent coding none of these concerns matter any more.

What matters most is can easily look at the code and understand the intent clearly. That the agent doesn't get distracted by formatting. That the code is relatively memory safe, type safe and avoids null issues and cannot ignore errors.

I dislike Go but I am a lot more likely to use it in this new world.

Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

#26

Post by jaggederest »

0x3f wrote: post #5

I 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.

Haskell is great, for what it's worth, but as with any language you have to reign in the AI's use of excessive verbosity. It will stack abstractions to the moon even for simple projects, and haskell's strengths for humans in this regard are weaknesses for AI - different weaknesses than other languages, but still, TANSTAAFL

I am trying out building a toy language hosted on Haskell and it's been a nice combo - the toy language uses dependent typing for even more strictness, but simple regular syntax which is nicer for LLMs to use, and under the hood if you get into the interpreter you can use the full richness of Haskell with less safety guardrails of dependent typing. A bit like safe/unsafe Rust.

Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

#27

Post by b40d-48b2-979e »

bensyverson wrote: post #7
0x3f wrote: post #5

I 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 built an agent with Go for the exact reasons laid out in the article, but did consider Rust. I would prefer it to be Rust actually. But the #1 reason I chose Go is token efficiency. My intuitive sense was that the LLM would have to spent a lot of time reasoning about lifetimes, interpreting and fixing compiler warnings, etc.

LLMs don't "reason".

Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

#28

Post by moritz »

C.f., from 25d ago:

“Why Elixir is the best language for AI” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900241

- for comparison of the arguments made

- features a bit more actual data than “intuitions” compared to OP

- interesting to think about in an agent context specifically is runtime introspection afforded by the BEAM (which, out of how it developed, has always been very important in that world) - the blog post has a few notes on that as well

Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

#29

Post by g947o »

0x3f wrote: post #5

I 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 do that as the session goes. Never happens with Rust in my experience.

Post reply on HN