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Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

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Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#201

Post by baby »

rienbdj wrote: post #130

I have no interest in Go because it is so limited, more limited than other languages that I have already moved beyond, such as C#. I am far more interested in cutting edge languages such as Rust (borrow checker) or Idris (dependent types) or even C++ 20 (template madness), since these will allow me to express things that I cannot express in other languages. What does Go bring to the table? Note that my perspective is…

Golang brings a language that can’t be abused by programmers like you who will write incomprehensible template madness for all other devs on your team.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#202

Post by baby »

dfgdghdf wrote: post #169
jahaja wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does Go bring to the table? A still maintainable code base 5 years along.

Is it really though? Go is not expressive enough to model your problem domain in a concise and coherent way, which leads to very large code-bases compared to other languages. Whilst each line is easy to understand in the small (because there is very little abstraction), it becomes extremely difficult to understand how the code works in the large.

I’ve worked on both large rust and go codebases and I can’t agree with you.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#203

Post by loxs »

piinbinary wrote: post #171
dhekir wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OCaml is good for handling abstract syntax trees (strong typing, pattern matching) and its mix of imperative and functional programming don't require using borrow-checker nor monads. You can also consider Reason, if you prefer a more C-like syntax.

I really ought to learn OCaml (besides just the toy programs I've written). I think if I got past the messy ecosystem (is tuareg the right thing to use, or is that the old thing?) I'd really like it.

I just migrated fully from OCaml to Rust. Couldn't be happier. I cannot even start to explain how big a difference a stable and mature ecosystem (including tooling) makes.

Language-wise, Rust leaves some (small) things to be desired with regards of ergonomics, but this isn't even close to offsetting the general feeling of developer friendliness and fitness to the problems it aims to solve. The borrow mechanics/lifetimes are godsend and one starts to wonder why all languages are not like this.

Rust completely exhausted the problem domains of these languages (for me): Java, Go, OCaml, even Python for something that would require more than 50 lines of code. Once you "get it", it's not harder to write than these.

OCaml still has some very advanced features (types) like polymorphic variants, GADTs and others, which I have used in the past to elegantly solve (in a type safe way) problems. But at least for my use-cases (and the software that I migrated) these were mostly problems created by the functional, garbage collected nature of OCaml. With Rust's imperative (but still very type-safe) nature I just don't need to apply such complicated idioms - it seems to fit perfectly to the "real world problems". And on top of that I get 3-4x speedup "for free" (for the program that I migrated). I added some very "lightweight" (as in "easy to do") parallelism and I got another x3 speedup (for the most frequent use case). This kind of speedup makes a dramatic difference. It enables me to do things that were previously not possible in the OCaml version.

And yes, on top of that I get to use Cargo, which feels decades ahead of every other package manager I have used and the IDE support (at least in IntelliJ/CLion) is pretty good (OCaml is nowhere near).

PS. And Traits are extremely cool

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#204

Post by apta »

ncmncm wrote: post #196
speedgoose wrote: post #126

Its a great programming language that is helpful to solve problems without wasting time. I really appreciate the simplicity, I think it totally makes sense at work where not everyone wants to deal with weird code. I think maintaining old golang code will not be a major problem in the future for example. The garbage collector make things a lot simpler too. The dependencies management is not great compared to npm/crate…

Go is carefully designed to be adequate for the large majority of problems that don't need much, meant for use by the large majority of programmers who don't know or need much, whose attention is elsewhere. It is hard to get too deep into the weeds by accident. It builds fast, so programmers who code by successive approximation, making more or less random changes until something works can get there quickly. It runs p…

golang is anemic in front of Java (the JVM, the language, and the ecosystem) and introduces its own set of gotchas. Once Java gets green threads (by means of Project Loom), golang will be an extremely difficult sell for anyone considering a new project.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#205

Post by apta »

It's a very mediocre language with many poor design decisions. It only got traction because of the Google name behind it (it's predecessors designed at other companies were barely recognized).

It's ok for writing small tools or simplistic web servers. For complex non-trivial applications, it is very poor at modeling, which introduces a lot of friction when dealing with larger code bases. Performance is adequate and nothing to brag about (it sacrifices throughput for latency) and compiling speed took a hit when they rewrote the compiler from C to golang. Linking times are quite abysmal for larger projects.

Depending on what you want to do, there are superior alternatives. Java and C# are both better in almost every aspect (and keep closing the gap when it comes to low latency and small footprint), and Rust is also a potential viable option if you are running in a memory constrained environment.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#206

Post by apta »

andreygrehov wrote: post #94
pydry wrote: post #22

My fingers are getting real tired from typing if err != nil all the damn time. I do like it for small things - compiling to one (albeit huge) binary and its relative speediness is nice. I wouldn't use it for large systems though. The amount of code really balloons over time, relative to, say, python and that SLOC correlates to bugs and maintenance cost.

Curious, what's your definition of a large system?

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I've had similar experiences with larger programs in golang. It's quite terrible to deal with, and overly verbose. I'd say anything more than 2000-3000 lines and golang becomes tedious to manage (and that isn't much given how verbose golang is).

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#207

Post by apta »

lanstin wrote: post #139
one2know wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

return values don't say anything about possible code paths. If you are saying the function should document what could go wrong when it is called, Java solved this 24 years ago when each method lists the exceptions they throw. If you need to know what the back trace/call stack was when the error happened, well that is stored in the exception. People that use return codes simply don't check every possible value, otherw…

Explain the Java services that only ever return an HTTP 200 and either return the proper XML response or a java stack trace formatted into HTML. And my point is those if statement are wanted by the people that write high reliability software in C. There just isn’t a substitute for thinking about errors. Even well done exception throwing systems will specific “this layer can throw, this middle layer won’t worry about…

> And my point is those if statement are wanted by the people that write high reliability software in C.

Because that's basically the only way of handling errors in C. That kind of software is written despite C's poor error handling, not because of it, and frankly, C is not the best example in writing high reliability software. Undefined behavior is a huge issue with it.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#208

Post by apta »

lanstin wrote: post #121
one2know wrote: post #70

Great tool, two big negatives. First, checking result values is dumb. It adds 50% more code. Add exception handling. Second, the way imports work is obviously due to some internal google kitschy-ness. Remote import paths are so dumb. People set up entire domains and CDN's just to host some code. The import path has to have a specific format, you can't have three levels. github.com/me/sub1/module won't work, so everyo…

A super important principal for large code base is locality. I should be able to look at a function and understand everything about its possible code paths. Exceptions make this impossible (most of my experience with exceptions coming from C++ and Python). People that think like me would forbid exceptions every where.

> I should be able to look at a function and understand everything about its possible code paths.

Any golang function can panic, so you always have to account for it anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#209

Post by pjmlp »

ncmncm wrote: post #196
speedgoose wrote: post #126

Its a great programming language that is helpful to solve problems without wasting time. I really appreciate the simplicity, I think it totally makes sense at work where not everyone wants to deal with weird code. I think maintaining old golang code will not be a major problem in the future for example. The garbage collector make things a lot simpler too. The dependencies management is not great compared to npm/crate…

Go is carefully designed to be adequate for the large majority of problems that don't need much, meant for use by the large majority of programmers who don't know or need much, whose attention is elsewhere. It is hard to get too deep into the weeds by accident. It builds fast, so programmers who code by successive approximation, making more or less random changes until something works can get there quickly. It runs p…

Yes, what Go failed to acknowledge was how those decisions impacted Java and Visual Basic language evolution and actually learn from them.

Re: Ask HN: Go programming language is over ten years old. What do you think of it?

#210

Post by pjmlp »

apta wrote: post #204
ncmncm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is carefully designed to be adequate for the large majority of problems that don't need much, meant for use by the large majority of programmers who don't know or need much, whose attention is elsewhere. It is hard to get too deep into the weeds by accident. It builds fast, so programmers who code by successive approximation, making more or less random changes until something works can get there quickly. It runs p…

golang is anemic in front of Java (the JVM, the language, and the ecosystem) and introduces its own set of gotchas. Once Java gets green threads (by means of Project Loom), golang will be an extremely difficult sell for anyone considering a new project.

Until Docker, Kubernetes and its ill fades into obscurity, even us on Java and .NET platforms now need to keep a passing knowledge of Go for tooling related on the eco-system.
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