Comment by xtracto
1 day ago
I recently started writing Go for a new job, after 20 years of not touching a compiled language for something serious (I've done DevKitArm dev. as a hobby).
I know it's mostly a matter of tastes, but darn, it feels horrible. And there are no default parameter values, and the error hanling smells bad, and no real stack trace in production. And the "object orientation" syntax, adding some ugly reference to each function. And the pointers...
It took me back to my C/C++ days. Like programming with 25 year old technology from back when I was in university in 1999.
And then people are amazed for it to achieve compile times, compiled languages were already doing on PCs running at 10 MHz within the constraints of 640 KB (TB, TP, Modula-2, Clipper, QB).
> [some] compiled languages were already doing on PCs running at 10 MHz within the constraints of 640 KB
Many compiled languages are very slow to compile however, especially for large projects, C++ and rust being the usual examples.
It is weird to lump C++ and Rust together. I have used Rust code bases that compile in 2-3 minutes what a C++ compiler would take literally hours to compile.
I feel people who complain about rustc compile times must be new to using compiled languages…
1 reply →
True, however there are more programming languages than only C++ and Rust.
Well, spewing out barely-optimized machine code and having an ultra-weak type system certainly helps with speed - a la Go!
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That's a bit unfair to the modern compilers - there's a lot more standards to adhere to, more (micro)architectures, frontends need to plug into IRs into optimisers into codegen, etc. Some of it is self-inflicted: do you need yet-another 0.01% optimisation? At the cost of maintainability, or even correctness? (Hello, UB.) But most of it is just computers evolving.
But those are not rules. If you're doing stuff for fun, check out QBE <https://c9x.me/compile/> or Plan 9 C <https://plan9.io/sys/doc/comp.html> (which Go was derived from!)
Indeed, and thankfully there exist languages like D and Delphi to prove as being a modern compiler and fast compilation times are still possible 40 years later.
> That's a bit unfair to the modern compilers
It's really not. Proebsting's Law applies.
Given that, compilers/languages should be optimized for programmer productivity first and code speed second.
If you want a nice modern compiled language, try Kotlin. It's not ideal, but it's very ergonomic and has very reasonable compile times (to JVM, I did not play with native compilation). People also praise Nim for being nice towards the developer, but I don't have any first-hand experience with it.
I have only used Kotlin on the JVM. You're saying there's a way to avoid the JVM and build binaries with it? Gotta go look that up. The problem with Kotlin is not the language but finding jobs using it can be spotty. "Kotlin specialist" isn't really a thing at all. You can find more Golang and Python jobs than Kotlin.
But it's not--Go is a thoroughly modern language, minus a few things as noted in this discussion. But it's very and I've written quite a few APIs for corporate clients using it and they are doing great.