Comment by kstenerud
20 hours ago
I used go for years, and while it's able to get small things up and running quickly, bigger projects soon become death-by-a-thousand-cuts.
Debugging is a nightmare because it refuses to even compile if you have unused X (which you always will have when you're debugging and testing "What happens if I comment out this bit?").
The bureaucracy is annoying. The magic filenames are annoying. The magic field names are annoying. The secret hidden panics in the standard library are annoying. The secret behind-your-back heap copies are annoying (and SLOW). All the magic in go eventually becomes annoying, because usually it's a naively repurposed thing (where they depend on something that was designed for a different purpose under different assumptions, but naively decided to depend on its side effects for their own ever-so-slightly-incompatible machinery - like special file names, and capitalization even though not all characters have such a thing .. was it REALLY such a chore to type "pub" for things you wanted exposed?).
Now that AI has gotten good, I'm rather enjoying Rust because I can just quickly ask the AI why my types don't match or a gnarly mutable borrow is happening - rather than spending hours poring over documentation and SO questions.
I haven't done serious Rust development since AI got good, but I did have a brief play last December and it's shocking how good they are at Rust. It feels like the verbose syntax and having tons of explicit information everywhere just makes it breeze through problems that would trip up a human for ages.
> Debugging is a nightmare because it refuses to even compile if you have unused X
Go people will yell at you because you aren't using the right tool.
Yeah, Go is too rigid with their principles.
I once described this "debugging" problem to one of the creators and he did not even understand the problem. It is so amateurish you wonder if they ever dipped a toe outside the academic world.
Btw, AI sucks on GO. One would have guessed that such a simple lang would suit ChatGPT. Turns out ChatGPT is much better at Java, C#, Pyhton and many other langs than GO.
I’ve had no worse success with AI and Go I have for any other language (JavaScript, Python, Terraform, Swift).
I’d say Terraform was the worst. But that shouldn’t be a surprise given it’s niche
Well, they did create Unix and C, so they aren't entirely academic.