Why people in Google hate Go?

#1

Post by altun » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:07 AM UTC

When you search "golang" on google for a long time, the question "Why people hate Go?" comes up at the top.

Now the blog post "A new way to bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly" written by the team of V8 (JavaScript and WebAssembly engine) on the official website of Google has appeared.

https://v8.dev/blog/wasm-gc-porting

When I saw in the first paragraph of the blog that "we will get into the technical details of how GC languages such as Java, Kotlin, Dart, Python, and C# can be ported to Wasm" the question "Why people in Google hate Go?" arose

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#2

Post by altun » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:13 AM UTC

Related: The State of WebAssembly 2023

https://blog.scottlogic.com/2023/10/18/the-state-of-webassem....

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#3

Post by Someone » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:17 AM UTC

They don’t mention go in that list of languages that now can be compiled for the browser because go already has a wasm backend (GOARCH=wasm)

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#4

Post by destevil » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:23 AM UTC

Go isn't a serious language for large systems. The language allows writing shitty code and the community has largely adopted that. Go fanatics will hate this, but you simply can't compare it with the ability to write and maintain in languages like Java.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#5

Post by jjgreen » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:48 AM UTC

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#6

Post by gjvc » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:51 AM UTC

destevil wrote: post #4

Go isn't a serious language for large systems. The language allows writing shitty code and the community has largely adopted that. Go fanatics will hate this, but you simply can't compare it with the ability to write and maintain in languages like Java.

I'll bite. Why can't you compare it? Is it the class/function on struct thing? Generics? Go-routines not threads? Rob Pike did say once that the GC is deliberately not tunable because a JVM knob-twiddler should not be a job title.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#7

Post by guntherhermann » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:51 AM UTC

destevil wrote: post #4

Go isn't a serious language for large systems. The language allows writing shitty code and the community has largely adopted that. Go fanatics will hate this, but you simply can't compare it with the ability to write and maintain in languages like Java.

Can you give an example of 'shitty code'? We've got murmurs of Go being adopted by some teams so if you have first hand experience it'd be really useful

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#8

Post by k__ » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

K8s is it's lifeline.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#9

Post by ecmascript » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

I don't use Go since it's from Google but I wouldn't say that Go / Java can't be used for performance critical stuff?

There are a lot of values that goes into "performance critical stuff". For me, it can mean a chat app / money transfers etc that is performance critical but is is of course not as critical as in flight software or other system control software where GC could mean deaths.

Re: Why people in Google hate Go?

#10

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

jjgreen wrote: post #5

Go puzzles me. It's slower than C/C++/Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?

This talk by Rob Pike answers some of your questions: https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article