Why people in Google hate Go? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#31

Post by usrnm » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:02 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

Go is basically a very specialized language for writing small network services that are supposed to run on Linux. If this isn't your use case, then don't use go, but if it is, then golang is nice. Mostly the runtime and tools, not the language itself, though

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#32

Post by vimsee » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

Why does it need to be the best in one single metric when it can be great in many?

It is an order of magnitude faster than Python. So it is well suited for performance in many cases.

It is a lot easier to pick up than C/C++. So it is well suited for smaller programs.

I can see Go as a very good middle-ground.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#33

Post by jjgreen » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

amelius wrote: post #11

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

The same can be said about Rust: its popularity exceeds its scope, because 99% of applications I see that are written in Rust are better off written in a GCed language.

As fast as C but with correctness, Rust kind-of owns that space (not a big fan personally).

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#34

Post by merb » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

boxmein wrote: post #24

Go is an extremely productive language in our experience (large majority of the back-end is in Go). Go excels in tooling and code sharing, and onboarding developers with Go is efficient. It also has an extremely small runtime footprint, reducing ecological footprint and server costs :) An average JVM needs 500+ MB of RAM, whereas our average Go microservice hovers around 25 MB. Last but not least, it is not tied to t…

You can actually fine tune to run the jvm at the same memory footprint as go. It’s just not easy to do so. Especially since it lacks structure/value types.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#35

Post by leetrout » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:04 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #16

guntherhermann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of 'shitty code'? We've got murmurs of Go being adopted by some teams so if you have first hand experience it'd be really useful

Single letter variables. A terrible pattern the go community picks up.

Eh. Yes and no. I have not worked on a team that enforces that and I do agree with using them for short functions with 1 or 2 types. I do this in python as well

  with open(..) as f:

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#36

Post by evilc00kie » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:04 AM UTC

boxmein wrote: post #24

Go is an extremely productive language in our experience (large majority of the back-end is in Go). Go excels in tooling and code sharing, and onboarding developers with Go is efficient. It also has an extremely small runtime footprint, reducing ecological footprint and server costs :) An average JVM needs 500+ MB of RAM, whereas our average Go microservice hovers around 25 MB. Last but not least, it is not tied to t…

> Last but not least, it is not tied to the existing C ecosystem, which is a HUGE value

They also provide their own crypto within the standardlib. No openssl needed.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#37

Post by favadi » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:04 AM UTC

> When you search "golang" on google for a long time, the question "Why people hate Go?" comes up at the top.

I don't see this article in the first page when searching for golang. Maybe the results is personalized based on your search history?

> Why people in Google hate Go?

I really doubt that. Most developers I know, that worked with Go for a while, love it for its simplicity and tooling.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#38

Post by jjgreen » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:05 AM UTC

cultavix wrote: post #26

k__ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

K8s is it's lifeline.

Exactly. This is exactly my thought, my only reason for learning Go Lang at all, was/is because of Kubernetes and much of the tooling around it.

Interesting -- thanks for that

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#39

Post by dontlaugh » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:05 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

OOP is generally a bad idea, so lacking it is not a downside.

The bigger problem is the weak and inexpressive type system, which is no better for C or Python.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#40

Post by andrewstuart » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 11:07 AM UTC

There’s still no ideal language.

Closest seems something like Zig but it doesn’t seem to be getting much velocity.

I really wish TypeScript had an official native code compiler. It did have one but only for microcontrollers and I’m not sure even that still exists.