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Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

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Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#51

Post by yosefk »

jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

Uber reported that their Go code has quantitatively more concurrency bugs than code in other languages, and while to me it seems obvious from looking at Go's concurrency model, this is backed by actual data. Is there any quantitative data to back the claim that Go is better in an LLM based workflow than another popular language?

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#53

Post by win311fwg »

hugodan wrote: post #30

Who cares? Languages are tools, LLMs are tools. Use the ones more appropriate for what you are trying to do. Is Go better than CSS if you are doing web layouts? Is it better than zig if you are outputting minimal wasm deliverables? Is it better than swift if you are doing iOS specific development? Is it better than bash for OS scripting? Think about what you are doing and choose appropriately. This was true before LL…

> Is it better than zig if you are outputting minimal wasm deliverables?

Which tradeoffs are you willing to accept? Zig (along with several other languages) is superior in a lot of ways for that type of job, but I still settled on Go for a particular minimal WASM (browser) project. It wasn't my first choice, but it was where I ended up because LLMs kept going out to lunch in other languages and I didn't have anywhere close to the required budget to write it by hand. I read some comments like these about Go in the past so the Go attempt was mostly a contrarian Hail Mary after so many previous failed attempts in more technically well suited languages and... it worked! Shockingly well.

It still isn't my first choice for it, but having something useful with happy users beats technical imperfection every day of the week as far as my needs go. Go really did show its worth as an LLM target for that particular workload. Whether or not that is reproducible for any other project remains to be seen, but there seems to be a growing sentiment that echos the same. There just might be something to it.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#54

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

mg wrote: post #41

My expectation is that AI will give us a way to nicely quantify how productivity is impacted by choice of language. Because we can rerun the same request as often as we like and compare the results. And I expect that it will turn out Python is the most productive. As it is most easy to reason about. It allows for the most elegant expression of the idea behind a program. The first tests I have seen seem to confirm thi…

It is unclear to me though how much of your expectation might be set by the training dataset.

For example, Python and Typescript have the most amount of codebases and training being done on. So I feel as if that plays a part into the overall thing.

Languages which are more niche have genuinely hard times (Try arturo lang for example), so it depends on a lot of things/nuance, or well that has been my experience trying something recently.

My personal opinion is that if each language has the same amount of training. Golang comes close but the first might be Elixir. I have seen Elixir language perform really well with LLM's with magnitudes less training dataset. There have been some studies which had Elixir as the number one language for such tests iirc.

Gleam is a new addition as well and I feel as if it could be good and its another interesting option as well with more type-safety and an interesting language overall.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#55

Post by Buttons840 »

I'd argue Go is not on a "Pareto frontier" and that no matter how you value the various attributes of programming languages, a fair assessment will never select Go.

A simple example is: if you highly value language popularity; Go is not most popular. If you highly value a type system that catches errors; Go's type system catches fewer errors than others. Etc. There is no weighted sum of attributes that will select Go--that's my argument.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#56

Post by [deleted] »

mg wrote: post #41

My expectation is that AI will give us a way to nicely quantify how productivity is impacted by choice of language. Because we can rerun the same request as often as we like and compare the results. And I expect that it will turn out Python is the most productive. As it is most easy to reason about. It allows for the most elegant expression of the idea behind a program. The first tests I have seen seem to confirm thi…

[deleted]

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#57

Post by kev009 »

dralley wrote: post #23
simonw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.

For whatever reason, maybe not even logical ones, Go repulses me. I don't know why exactly, I like the idea of Go, but the aesthetics rub me wrong. I think it's the use of pointers and "if err != nil {}" error handling spam. It reads as a highly compromised imitation of Python and C rather than a solid execution of some other idea. Rust is not the most beautiful language out there but it doesn't trigger any such reac…

Because Go is kind of a Steampunk design. The creators collectively ignored decades of PL developments. What that nets is kind of a C without sharp edges, but can't be used where C can.

Rust is definitely jarring to look at, in the same way that decoding some strange C declaration can be, in ye olde days when you had to float all this context in your mind while doing work. But with modern tooling who cares: "explain this lifetime to me"

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#58

Post by vips7L »

yosefk wrote: post #51
jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

Uber reported that their Go code has quantitatively more concurrency bugs than code in other languages, and while to me it seems obvious from looking at Go's concurrency model, this is backed by actual data. Is there any quantitative data to back the claim that Go is better in an LLM based workflow than another popular language?

You know there’s no quantitative data. It’s vibes from the top down.

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#59

Post by melodyogonna »

jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

Isn't Netflix a Java shop

Re: Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering

#60

Post by rubiquity »

yosefk wrote: post #51
jeanbza wrote: post #27

Definitely agree with this article. At Netflix, I lead the Go language guild. We've been seen increasing reports of users finding their AI agents writing better Go code than other languages, and increasing reports of projects favouring Go over other languages. Two additional notes I'll add: - Go has _great_ resources on writing good Go code, including treasure troves at https://go.dev/doc/effective_go and https://goo…

Uber reported that their Go code has quantitatively more concurrency bugs than code in other languages, and while to me it seems obvious from looking at Go's concurrency model, this is backed by actual data. Is there any quantitative data to back the claim that Go is better in an LLM based workflow than another popular language?

Matches my experience as well. Go fans have conflated "can easily make something concurrent" with "does concurrency well." Go's primitives for concurrency should almost never be used directly and Engineers below a certain skill level shouldn't be allowed to use them directly ever for long running production code.

As another example, Go still has not yielded a correct implementation of Raft or Paxos while there are dozens in Java, C++, and Rust. Antithesis found some more bugs in HashiCorp's Raft implementation recently[0]. I'm sure etcd still has some kicking around.

Maybe this is a "don't throw the baby out with the bath water' problem but the general evolution of Go has been lackluster. I reach for Rust, Zig, and modern Java instead depending on the specific needs and constraints.

0 - https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/finding-bugs-in-raft-implem...

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