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Why I'm not very excited about Go

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Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#31

Post by sedachv »

stcredzero wrote: post #20
sedachv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's my understanding that one can use "goroutines" to implement your own rather powerful control structures. I'm not sure one really needs exceptions if you have goroutines, channels, and multiple return values. On the other hand, there are very compelling reasons for not having exceptions, given goroutines and channels." The "goroutines" are just threads. They're not useful for building control structures. Unless…

I'm not talking about "faking" exceptions. I'm talking about just not using them. Instead of "catching" exceptions down (up? In my debugger, it's down) the stack, you can just detect errors and send something down a channel. If you can conveniently send the current function's pointer, or better yet, the current context, you can do much of what you'd use exceptions for.

How do you detect errors? That's the question that the exception-handling part of exceptions is designed to solve. Having every function need a reference to a channel is really no different than error detection using return codes.

Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#32

Post by 9oliYQjP »

dkersten wrote: post #18
sedachv wrote: post #9

I honestly don't get what the point of Go is. Why not D? Why not Modula3? There is nothing at all compelling in the feature set. Just look at the crap they put in for the built-in concurrency primitives: http://golang.org/doc/go_mem.html So we're back to CSP. Welcome to the 1960s.

My thoughts exactly, as I stated here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937765

You're going to be down-voted to oblivion as my comment was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938814. Google of 2009 has become the Microsoft of 1999. They can release anything and people will love them for it without skepticism. Let them. The sheep can follow their new overlord while the rest of us actually innovate. I highly suspect had Yahoo or Microsoft Research released Go, it would have received a much more lacklustre reception.

Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#33

Post by sedachv »

thenduks wrote: post #25
sedachv wrote: post #9

I honestly don't get what the point of Go is. Why not D? Why not Modula3? There is nothing at all compelling in the feature set. Just look at the crap they put in for the built-in concurrency primitives: http://golang.org/doc/go_mem.html So we're back to CSP. Welcome to the 1960s.

I'm not sure how 'crap' comes to mind just looking at the concurrency primitives. You seem to have something against ` The 'point' of Go is to be a 'expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected' systems language. It's very early in it's lifecycle and of course immature at the moment... Let's just wait and see what happens in stead of writing it off, shall we?

Umm, yeah, I've been researching and programming concurrent systems for some time now. CSP is not a good way of doing that.

Go is not very early in its lifecycle. Just look at the feature set - it's the very direct continuation of the work Pike and Thompson were doing on Plan9.

Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#34

Post by thenduks »

sedachv wrote: post #33
thenduks wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how 'crap' comes to mind just looking at the concurrency primitives. You seem to have something against ` The 'point' of Go is to be a 'expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected' systems language. It's very early in it's lifecycle and of course immature at the moment... Let's just wait and see what happens in stead of writing it off, shall we?

Umm, yeah, I've been researching and programming concurrent systems for some time now. CSP is not a good way of doing that. Go is not very early in its lifecycle. Just look at the feature set - it's the very direct continuation of the work Pike and Thompson were doing on Plan9.

CSP is not a good way of doing that.

Someone should tell Ericsson!

...plan9...

Well... I don't know, I'd consider a language started around the mid nineties pretty early in it's life-cycle. But it's pretty clear to me that which it may be a 'continuation' it's definitely not just 'rebranded'. This is a new project and there's tons of talk all over the place about how "we're working on that". The garbage collector isn't even done yet!

Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#35

Post by sedachv »

thenduks wrote: post #34
sedachv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, yeah, I've been researching and programming concurrent systems for some time now. CSP is not a good way of doing that. Go is not very early in its lifecycle. Just look at the feature set - it's the very direct continuation of the work Pike and Thompson were doing on Plan9.

CSP is not a good way of doing that. Someone should tell Ericsson! ...plan9... Well... I don't know, I'd consider a language started around the mid nineties pretty early in it's life-cycle. But it's pretty clear to me that which it may be a 'continuation' it's definitely not just 'rebranded'. This is a new project and there's tons of talk all over the place about how "we're working on that". The garbage collector isn…

Erlang is based on message passing ala Actors. Very different things.

Take a look at this if you don't believe that their approach hasn't changed: http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/

Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#36

Post by cabalamat »

wavesplash wrote: post #26
cabalamat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of Java, but one of its good points is that threads are part of the language and their behaviour is predicatable across implementations.

That isn't really the case. Java's threading can either be green threads or OS threads and there's no way as a programmer to know what the JVM implements on any given platform.

I stand corrected. Thanks.

Re: Why I'm not very excited about Go

#37

Post by dkersten »

9oliYQjP wrote: post #32
dkersten wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly, as I stated here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937765

You're going to be down-voted to oblivion as my comment was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938814 . Google of 2009 has become the Microsoft of 1999. They can release anything and people will love them for it without skepticism. Let them. The sheep can follow their new overlord while the rest of us actually innovate. I highly suspect had Yahoo or Microsoft Research released Go, it would have received a much…

I thought my being downvoted here had more to do with linking to a negative (towards Go) comment, rather than the comment itself. My other comments critical of Google Go have been generally upvoted. But you're right. I think if Google weren't involved, nobody would even give Go a second look.
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