What Golang Is and Is Not

If you make a program that is executed a million of times or more a day, it make sense to have a language that is "near the CPU", and allows to optimize and speed up the most. This is what Go is. It will be a mistake to use it elsewhere.

What an amazing time to be alive! (Sorry for missing yesterday's Go post - I was down for maintenance)

> “There is nothing new under the sun” rings true in all languages since the 80’s.

Really? Nothing? Sure a language like Rust has drawn from many other concepts in other languages, but it has done so while actually bringing high level features to a language that has zero overhead costs. But yes, it's not simple like Go.

Did Go need to make all errors unchecked? There are no guide rails telling you that you forgot to check an error result. This is a runtime thing you need to discover. Is this actually simpler?

Go made the decision to allow for Null, even after nearly every other modern language and other older ones are trying to kick it to the curb; Swift, Rust, Scala, Kotlin, no nulls (the JVM ones have a compatability problem, as does swift with ObjC, but still). Is it simpler to delay discovery of Null data to runtime?

Go decided to not have generics, to keep the language easier to learn and more approachable. It's hard to argue with this one. Like lambdas, it can be a complicated concept to learn, but once you unlock this in you code, you write less code and accomplish more. So yes, it's simpler, but at too high a cost IMO.

To me the innovative feature of Go is the small runtime built into the binary making deployment dead simple and easy. This is a million times better than JVM, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc. This is a huge improvement over Java, and something every language should have an option for. Ironically this is also the least innovative feature, because this is how static binaries in C and C++ have worked for years.

I think this article is very well written, but I don't think it's fair to the innovation going on in other languages.

(Disclaimer: I used Go, discovered the three primary flaws as I listed above, and then searched for a better language. It would be fair to call me a hater, usually I try to avoid this, but in this case that's fine with me)

Not only C++, there are plenty of options.

The only thing good about Go, is being an evolution path for C coders willing to embrace a GC and some type safety.

Elixir is nicer to look at, Go is easier to understand.