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Eight years of Go

blog.golang.org

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Re: Eight years of Go

#41

Post by rdsubhas »

nine_k wrote: post #7

Go is an example of how to be extremely successful by catering to the needs of the project's core audience (well-rounded stdlib, extremely fast GC, short build times, trivial deployment, etc) while paying much less attention to the vocal minority's complaints (generics, package system, etc).

I'm not sure what you mean by vocal minority's complaints.

Golang generics is the second most voted issue on GitHub itself: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Areac...

(I'm not sure if GitHub sorting is broken, but the same issue has more +1s than the top +1d issue as per that sort mode as well)

Generics has the most experience reports in Go 2 proposal. Maybe this can be categorized and excluded as a vocal minority, but above data doesn't seem to.

Re: Eight years of Go

#42

Post by nine_k »

krylon wrote: post #30
nine_k wrote: post #7

Go is an example of how to be extremely successful by catering to the needs of the project's core audience (well-rounded stdlib, extremely fast GC, short build times, trivial deployment, etc) while paying much less attention to the vocal minority's complaints (generics, package system, etc).

You are not wrong. But I think there is more to it. I have used Go (almost) exclusively for private toy programs I write in my free time to relax (sounds weird, I know), so my perspective may be warped. But something about is very compatible with the way my mind works. With some other languages, say C or C#, I find myself constantly browsing through documentation to figure out what a given construct means in that lan…

Go does have brilliant simplicity! It's the simplicity of Pascal I used in middle school, and of Modula-2 I used on my freshman year, with basically the same syntax. I'm glad Go revived a number of good ideas from Pascal / Modula / Oberon.

For writing toy programs to relax (can relate), I personally prefer Python, or maybe a Scheme. While also being simple at the core concepts, they have much more expressive power, an easier way to combine simple things into complex things. They pay for that by higher resource consumption, of course. I do fondly remember a PDP-11 Pascal compiler reporting "15 KB used" after compiling my program; you can't get a Python process with these constraints. But by now we have _vastly_ more computing power.

Re: Eight years of Go

#43

Post by oconnor663 »

noncoml wrote: post #2

Things I love about go: 1. Probably the best ecosystem out there. 2. Go routines 3. (Enabled by (2) actually) `defer` 4. That I can add interfaces implementations to structs I don’t own 5. No exceptions. Actually (5) is one of the few things I don’t like about Haskell. If Go had ADTs and generics it would easily be my favorite language. Edit: and of course the channels. Edit2: yeah, i have no idea why i connected (2)…

What's the connection between `defer` and goroutines?

Re: Eight years of Go

#44

Post by wheaties »

noncoml wrote: post #2

Things I love about go: 1. Probably the best ecosystem out there. 2. Go routines 3. (Enabled by (2) actually) `defer` 4. That I can add interfaces implementations to structs I don’t own 5. No exceptions. Actually (5) is one of the few things I don’t like about Haskell. If Go had ADTs and generics it would easily be my favorite language. Edit: and of course the channels. Edit2: yeah, i have no idea why i connected (2)…

The best ecosystem out there? Since when? I'd say that Java and Python have huge, wonderful and full ecosystems. Golang doesn't even come close to that, yet. Furthermore, Golang doesn't even have a community standard (or several standards) dependency manager.

Re: Eight years of Go

#45

Post by indescions_2017 »

> every single cloud company has critical components of their cloud infrastructure implemented in Go

And this is how the "network effect" propagates. As the customers of cloud services also begin to experiment in Golang. And discover the holistic ecosystem of distributed systems packages.

Even Blizzard with its massive C++ codebase is gaining converts

https://youtu.be/Az5F4lwSljI?t=23m50s

Re: Eight years of Go

#46

Post by tytytytytytytyt »

kown223 wrote: post #15
hood_syntax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the complaints about lack of generics really a minority thing? Writing separate functions to sort different types just strikes me as ridiculous. EDIT: My original tone was a bit nasty in retrospect. Did a little research and while I still am on the generics side, the current situation seems at least workable for a good number of use cases.

how often do you sort? most of the time you would do a database ORDER BY instead.

Thanks, that was great. :D

Re: Eight years of Go

#47

Post by theshrike79 »

rdsubhas wrote: post #41
nine_k wrote: post #7

Go is an example of how to be extremely successful by catering to the needs of the project's core audience (well-rounded stdlib, extremely fast GC, short build times, trivial deployment, etc) while paying much less attention to the vocal minority's complaints (generics, package system, etc).

I'm not sure what you mean by vocal minority's complaints. Golang generics is the second most voted issue on GitHub itself: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Areac... (I'm not sure if GitHub sorting is broken, but the same issue has more +1s than the top +1d issue as per that sort mode as well) Generics has the most experience reports in Go 2 proposal. Maybe this can be categorized and excluded a…

They haven't said "No" to generics.

What the developers want is for people to submit _actual_ problems that generics would solve, with examples. Because there are more than a few way to do it and they want to pick the right one.

Re: Eight years of Go

#48

Post by weberc2 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #29
hood_syntax wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the complaints about lack of generics really a minority thing? Writing separate functions to sort different types just strikes me as ridiculous. EDIT: My original tone was a bit nasty in retrospect. Did a little research and while I still am on the generics side, the current situation seems at least workable for a good number of use cases.

Yes, it is minor. Go has interfaces, so you just write a Comparer interface and sorter that takes two Comparers and then anything implementing Comparer is sortable. *Note: author has written basically nothing in Go and only has a passing familiarity.

If your `Comparer` is an element type (as opposed to Go's `sort.Interface` abstraction over collections), this is going to be horribly unperformant. Suppose your `Foo` type implements `Comparer`, and you have a large `[]Foo`. Then you'll first have to iterate over each element in `[]Foo` and add it to your `[]Comparer`, probably with an allocation per element. Then each invocation of `foo.Compare()` is going to be indirect as well (in other words, an interface lookup and a function call, i.e. no inlining). Mind you, this is still faster than many languages, but it's not the kind of performance people expect from Go.

Re: Eight years of Go

#49

Post by qyv »

rdsubhas wrote: post #41
nine_k wrote: post #7

Go is an example of how to be extremely successful by catering to the needs of the project's core audience (well-rounded stdlib, extremely fast GC, short build times, trivial deployment, etc) while paying much less attention to the vocal minority's complaints (generics, package system, etc).

I'm not sure what you mean by vocal minority's complaints. Golang generics is the second most voted issue on GitHub itself: https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+sort%3Areac... (I'm not sure if GitHub sorting is broken, but the same issue has more +1s than the top +1d issue as per that sort mode as well) Generics has the most experience reports in Go 2 proposal. Maybe this can be categorized and excluded a…

It is a vocal minority in the (probably correct) assumption that the majority of Go programmers are not part of that GitHub issue, nor any other group asking for Generics.

Re: Eight years of Go

#50

Post by joshmarlow »

kown223 wrote: post #37
tree_of_item wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I...I can't even believe you just said that. Go really does have a unique core audience.

care to enlighten me? if you have an index you could get the sort for free, also you never pull all results, so why would you pull all, just to sort, on the web I would love to work more in ram, but since you assume a server will crash, you need to save the actual state in the db.

I didn't down-vote, but what jumps out to me is the assumption that you'll generally be pulling data from a database. Yeah, that's almost certainly true in a web-application, but it's not going to be nearly as universal in a systems-programming niche which is where Go appears to be excelling (as perceived by someone outside of the Go community).

So ease of implementing sorting in your core language without making assumptions about the operating environment of code written in that language sounds like a reasonable demand.

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