Comment by rsanheim
8 hours ago
Java still had slow startup and warmup time circa 2005-2007, on the order of 1-3 seconds for hello world and quite a bit more for real apps. That is horrendous for anything CLI based.
And you left out classloader/classpath/JAR dependency hell, which was horrid circa late 90s/early 2000s...and I'm guessing was still a struggle when Go really started development. Especially at Google's scale.
Don't get me wrong, Java has come a long way and is a fine language and the JVM is fantastic. But the java of 2025 is not the same as mid-to-late 2000s.
Maybe so, although I don't recall it being that bad.
But Go wasn't designed for CLI apps. It was designed for writing highly multi-threaded servers at Google, according to the designers, hence the focus on features like goroutines. And in that context startup time just doesn't matter. Startup time of servers at Google was (in that era) dominated by cluster scheduling, connecting to backends, loading reference data and so on. Nothing that a change in programming language would have fixed.
Google didn't use classloader based frameworks so that also wasn't relevant.
Golang is frequently used for CLIs, even if it wasn't designed for that exactly