An Honest Review of Go (2025)
benraz.dev
An Honest Review of Go (2025)
1–10 of 184 posts
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#2Safari doesn't show the t's. Why?? Chrome does.
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#3I commend Go for popularizing the channel-based concurrency, since I do think that that is a very elegant way of structuring stuff (especially compared to mutexes), but I have to admit that I don’t have a lot of fun writing Go.
I agree with a lot of the sentiment of this post; the weirdness with “tuples”, the weirdness of the error types, and etc. It’s not a “bad” language, just one that I don’t enjoy using.
Historically to get something similar to Go-style concurrency I would use Clojure with core.async, but more recently I have started using Rust and Tokio.
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#4Lack of enums are the main point for me.
The error story is not ideal but less bad than that most of the time, as you can downcast to access extra error data. Still, harder than it needs to be.
Overall, I've grown to like using the language even despite its warts.
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#5fyi your about page doesn't work: https://benraz.dev/about.html
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#6Safari doesn't show the t's. Why?? Chrome does.
exactly wtf is up with this website, firefox doesn't show t's, random f's, d's - it's a complete mess.
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#7Go is a pleasure to use. The stdlib is one of the most complete, while keeping the keyword count low. LLMs understand it very well, project size stays low, line count stays low (if err nil included), doesn't need a bunch of scaffolded boilerplate in the project directory, and it compiles very quickly for a ton of OS and architectures. Very seldom do I ever need to go outside of the stdlib.
Is it perfect for everything? no. Is it the fastest compiled language out there? no. But, it'll do most things very well, and for me that's good enough. I choose go because when I need to make something, it steps aside and lets me build, and for that I have great respect and appreciation for it.
I will be defering all detractors and negative comments ;)
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#8As someone who's been back into Go a couple of times (oscillating between Python, "C-ish" languages and the like), the ONE thing I hate about Go is error handling. The rest I can live with just fine.
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#9One of the things I wish more people talked about isn't just the language or the syntax, but the ecosystem. Programming isn't just typing, it's dealing with dependencies and trying to wire everything up so you can have tests, benchmarks, code-generation and build scripts all working together well.
When I use modern languages like Go or Rust I don't have to deal with all the stuff added to other languages over the past 20 years like unicode, unit testing, linting, or concurrency.
I use Go where the team knows Java, Ruby or TypeScript but needs performance with low memory overhead. All the normal stuff is right there in the stdlib like JSON parsing, ECC / RSA encryption, or Image generation. You can write a working REST API with zero dependencies. Not to mention so far all Go programs I've ever seen still compile fine unlike those Python or Ruby projects where everything is broken because it's been 8mo.
However, I'd pick Rust when the team isn't scared of learning to program for real.
Re: An Honest Review of Go (2025)
#1010 years ago we started out with Python. We switched to Go probably 8 years back. I think my little startup would have utterly failed without Go. Thx google :)
But yes Enums are so much nicer in Kotlin vs Go. That's true, it doesn't impact productivity much, but he has a point.