Comment by giancarlostoro
1 day ago
No, this has been the case as long as Go has been around, then you look and its some C or C++ developer with specific needs, thats okay, its not for everyone.
1 day ago
No, this has been the case as long as Go has been around, then you look and its some C or C++ developer with specific needs, thats okay, its not for everyone.
I think with C or C++ devs, those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
I would criticize Go from the point of view of more modern languages that have powerful type systems like the ML family, Erlang/Elixir or even the up and coming Gleam. These languages succeed in providing powerful primitives and models for creating good, encapsulating abstractions. ML languages can help one entirely avoid certain errors and understand exactly where a change to code affects other parts of the code — while languages like Erlang provided interesting patterns for handling runtime errors without extensive boilerplate like Go.
It’s a language that hobbles developers under the aegis of “simplicity.” Certainly, there are languages like Python which give too much freedom — and those that are too complex like Rust IMO, but Go is at best a step sideways from such languages. If people have fun or get mileage out of it, that’s fine, but we cannot pretend that it’s really this great tool.
My biggest nitpick against Go was, is and still is the package management. Rust did it so nice and NuGet (C#/.NET) got it so right that Microsoft added it as a built-in thing for Visual Studio, it was originally a plugin and not from Microsoft whatsoever, now they fully own it which is fine, and it just works.
Cargo is amazing, and you can do amazing things with it, I wish Go would invest in this area more.
Also funny you mention Python, a LOT of Go devs are former Python devs, especially in the early days.
Which part of the package management/modules system do you find lacking?
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> I would criticize Go from the point of view of more modern languages that have powerful type systems like the ML
Go release date: 2012
ML: 1997
You forgot: CLU 1977.
". They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier."
https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...
And still there are more modern idioms and language features that ML had in the 70s but are missing from Go. But, these have the fatal flaw of Not being Invented Here.
Go was announced as a replacement for C & C++ so I think it's reasonable to compare it to that.
It was intended as a as a replacement for C & C++ for Google's use case of network services btw.
Not really, no one at other other than the original authors though of that, the authors had an issue with C++ compile times and were sponsored by their manager to work on this Go side project of theirs.
Google's networking services keep being writen in Java/Kotlin, C++, and nowadays Rust.
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It hasn't been promoted that way for over a decade at this point.