51–60 of 238 posts
If you like a sort of weakly-typed version of Python or PHP, use Go. As the article points out it can be good for web forms. Not all development is web forms.
With agentic coding you can just use Rust. AI agents are really good at Rust and the good error message the compiler and or borrow checker gives makes it easy for the AI agent to adjust its code and fix it. For non agentic coding Go has terrible error handling. It does not have exceptions or monadic error handling. Some call that a feature but many avoid Go or that specific reason. This will not change because that d…
The KEEP for Result goes into details, but basically there are a few ways of handling return values + errors:
1) throw exception if something goes wrong
2) return null if something goes wrong (stdlib XXXorNull)
3) Use Result in some cases, its error type is not paramerized and catches CancellationException
4) Use Arrow if Result doesn't meet your needs
5) Return Sealed Classes / Interfaces with all the possibilities.
Right now, I am going the Sealed Class interface route, but its such a verbose pain in the ass, so I only use it at certain levels of abstraction (like from a Repository, or library API, etc).
The code I needed to write was calling into okio, and it was not straightforward to figure out what kinds of exceptions would be thrown by the JVM layer underneath (docs just say IOException, but sublasses can be thrown).
Its sad to see they still haven't figured this out. Rich Errors was mentioned a year ago but its not even in preview yet. Its also not clear how it will work with Java interop.
The syntax changes a lot from the C one, and I can't see any reason for it. To me, it looks unstructured, with the lack of colons for example. It ignores memory safety, it feels like it ignored all of the typing system research since C, no discriminated union, and structures and types in general are heavy to write. It encourages bad patterns, errors out on mundane things like an unused variable, forces you to handle errors with a lot of code while not catching much more than C in terms of bug-prone practices. The package/module system is a nightmare for contributing to open source projects. Modifying a dependency to find a bug is very hard, even swapping a dependency (version) is annoying.
And what do you get from all of this compared to C? A garbage collector, tuples, and goroutines. No metaprogramming (aside from generics, and that was a whole story), interop with C is limited. To me, it looks like it does not focus on the algorithms, but on the code implementation, which is imo what leads us into poor programming and missing critical logic flaws, because the logic is buried. I may have forgotten other gripes I got while working with Go, but honestly, if I wanted all of that, I would pick D, at least it interops well with C and has metaprogramming (and has been made earlier, which excuses a little the lack of certain things).
But really, I am open to someone explaining me how they enjoy Go. Because I feel like I should be wrong as I see most people (which, for some of them, I know are clever) praise Go.
Edit: I added modal expressions to make it clear that it is my opinion.
A dig at Django's ORM seems hilarious. I wonder how many SQL injection vulnerabilities are written daily by Go devs.
Really hate we don't have proper type hints for Django.
Goroutines? Meh. Software transactional memory and green threads? Heck yeah.
An actual type system? Chef's kiss.
Scott Wlaschin from the F# world has written and talked extensively about F# for "boring" software. It works equally well in Haskell. You don't need to use type-level meta programming to spit out a basic service.
Monads are a great honking idea, btw.
I would not consider anything else without a good reason and especially never going for Javascript or TypeScript for anything server related.
I can write go but I don't prefer it. It's ... okay. Things I dislike: - if err != nil. Just give me some syntactic sugar instead of letting me write the same thing a bajillion time. - no way to bind a struct to an interface. I'd like my IDE to tell me when I accidentally stopped implementing an interface - some stdlib parts are too bare bones. Unpacking an archive requires me to handle all files, directories, links,…
I don't know about others, but Goland's analyser is pretty powerful and can navigate from interface to implementation(s) and vice versa.
I read this, as my computer crashed while compiling a 1000 dependency CRUD rust app, for the fourth time today. Then I take a deep breath.
If you like a sort of weakly-typed version of Python or PHP, use Go. As the article points out it can be good for web forms. Not all development is web forms.