I love Go. One thing I haven't seen noted here is how great it is for use in monorepos. Adding a new application is just a matter of making a folder and putting a main packaged go file with a main() func. Running go install at the root ./.. takes care of compiling everything quickly and easily.
This combined with the ease of building CLI programs has been an absolute godsend in the past when I've had to quickly spin up CLI tools which use business logic code to fix things.
It’s not true of C/C++ which need changes to the build system. Also true for rust workspaces which is how I’d recommend structuring monorepos although it is generally easy (you just need to add a small cargo.toml file) or you can not use a workspace but you still need to declare the binary if I recall correctly.
The distinction, I believe, is between "possible" and "easy". Go makes a lot of very specific things easy via some of its design choices with language and tooling.
As a counter example, it seems like e.g. c++ is mostly concerned about making things possible and rarely about easy.
I know they say that your programming language isn't the bottleneck, but I remember sitting there being frustrated as a young dev that I couldn't parse faster in the languages I was using when I learned about Go.
It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them)
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time: gotchas, concurrency stuff, everything. There is something very comforting about knowing the entire spec of a language.
I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++, and inevitably you'll come across some obscure thing and have to context switch out of reading code to learn whatever the fuck a "partial method" or "generic delegate" means, and then keep reading that codebase if you still have momentum left.
> The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time
This always feels like one of those “taste” things that some programmers tend to like on a personal level but has almost no evidence that it leads to more real-world success vs any other language.
Like, people get real work done every day at scale with C# and C++. And Java, and Ruby, and Rust, and JavaScript. And every other language that programmers castigate as being huge and bloated.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to have a preference for smaller languages, I just haven’t seen anything in my career to indicate that smaller languages outperform when it comes to faster delivery or less bugs.
As an aside, I’d even go so far as to say that the main problem with C++ is not that it has so many features in number, but that its features interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Said another way, it’s not the number of nodes in the graph, but the number of edges and the manner of those edges.
I've been writing go professionally for about ten years, and with go I regularly find myself saying "this is pretty boring", followed by "but that's a good thing" because I'm pretty sure that I won't do anything in a go program that would cause the other team members much trouble if I were to get run over by a bus or die of boredom.
In contrast writing C++ feels like solving an endless series of puzzles, and there is a constant temptation to do Something Really Clever.
The tradeoff with that language simplicity is that there's a whole lot of gotchas that come with Go. It makes things look simpler than they actually are.
I’ve been using Python since 2008, and I don’t feel like I understand very much of it at all, but after just a couple of years of using Go in a hobby capacity I felt I knew it very well.
> Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them
I think go is fairly small, too, but “size of spec” is not always a good measure for that. Some specs are very tight, others fairly loose, and tightness makes specs larger (example: Swift’s language reference doesn’t even claim to define the full language. https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...: “The grammar described here is intended to help you understand the language in more detail, rather than to allow you to directly implement a parser or compiler.”)
Well that's good, since Go was specifically designed for juniors.
From Rob Pike himself: "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."
However, the main design goal was to reduce build times at Google. This is why unused dependencies are a compile time error.
I feel like people always take the designed for juniors thing the wrong way by implying that beneficial (to general software engineering) features or ideas were left out as a trade off to make the language easier to learn at the cost of what the language could be to a senior. I don't think the go designers see these as opposing trade offs.
Whats good for the junior can be good for the senior. I think PL values have leaned a little too hard towards valuing complexity and abstract 'purity' while go was a break away from that that has proved successful but controversial.
> There are two reasons for having no warnings. First, if it’s worth complaining about, it’s worth fixing in the code. (Conversely, if it’s not worth fixing, it’s not worth mentioning.) Second, having the compiler generate warnings encourages the implementation to warn about weak cases that can make compilation noisy, masking real errors that should be fixed.
I believe this was a mistake (one that sadly Zig also follows). In practice there are too many things that wouldn't make sense being compiler errors, so you need to run a linter. When you need to comment out or remove some code temporarily, it won't even build, and then you have to remove a chain of unused vars/imports until it let's you, it's just annoying.
Meanwhile, unlinted go programs are full of little bugs, e.g. unchecked errors or bugs in err-var misuse. If there only were warnings...
I don't understand the framing you have here, of Rust being an asymptote of language capability. It isn't. It's its own set of tradeoffs. In 2025, it would not make much sense to write a browser in Go. But there are a lot of network services it doesn't really make sense to write in Rust: you give up a lot (colored functions, the borrow checker) to avoid GC and goroutines.
Rust is great. One of the stupidest things in modern programming practice is the slapfight between these two language communities.
Language can be bottleneck if there's something huge missing from it that you need, like how many of them didn't have first class support for cooperative multitasking, or maybe you need it to be compiled, or not compiled, or GC vs no GC. Go started out with solid greenthreading, while afaik no major lang/runtime had something comparable at the time (Java now does supposedly).
The thing people tend to overvalue is the little syntax differences, like how Scala wanted to be a nicer Java, or even ObjC vs Swift before the latter got async/await.
I'll be the one to nickpick, but Scala never intended to be a nicer Java. It was and still is an academic exercise in compiler and language theory. Also, judging by Kotlin's decent strides, "little Syntex differences" get you a long way on a competent VM/Runtime/stdlib.
It really is a lovely language and ecosystem of tools, I think it does show its limitations fairly quickly when you want to build something a bit complex though. Really wish they would have added sumtypes
I write a lot of Go, a bit of Rust, and Zig is slowly creeping in.
To add to the above comment, a lot of what Go does encourages readability... Yes it feels pedantic at moments (error handling), but those cultural, and stylistic elements that seem painful to write make reading better.
Portable binaries are a blessing, fast compile times, and the choices made around 3rd party libraries and vendoring are all just icing on the cake.
That 80 percent feeling is more than just the language, as written, its all the things that come along with it...
Error handling is objectively terrible in Go and the explicitness of the always repeating pattern just makes humans pay less attention to potentially problematic lines and otherwise increases the noise to signal ratio.
Similar story for me. I was looking for a language that just got out of the way. That didn’t require me to learn a full imparable DSL just to add a few dependencies and which could easily produce some artifact that I could share around without needing to make sure the target machine had all the right dependencies installed.
> I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
I don't see it. Can you say what 80% you feel like you're getting?
The type system doesn't feel anything alike, I guess the syntax is alike in the sense that Go is a semi-colon language and Rust though actually basically an ML deliberately dresses as a semi-colon language but otherwise not really. They're both relatively modern, so you get decent tooling out of the box.
But this feels a bit like if somebody told me that this new pizza restaurant does a cheese pizza that's 80% similar to the Duck Ho Fun from that little place near the extremely tacky student bar. Duck Ho Fun doesn't have nothing in common with cheese pizza, they're both best (in my opinion) if cooked very quickly with high heat - but there's not a lot of commonality.
> I don't see it. Can you say what 80% you feel like you're getting?
I read it as “80% of the way to Rust levels of reliability and performance.” That doesn’t mean that the type system or syntax is at all similar, but that you get some of the same benefits.
I might say that, “C gets you 80% of the way to assembly with 20% of the effort.” From context, you could make a reasonable guess that I’m talking about performance.
I guess the 80% would be a reasonably performant compiled binary with easily managed dependencies? And the extra 20% would be the additional performance and peace of mind provided by the strictness of the Rust compiler.
Single binary deployment was a big deal when Go was young; that might be worth a few percent. Also: automatically avoiding entire categories of potential vulnerabilities due to language-level design choices and features. Not compile times though ;)
To me, Go is like Rust oversimplified beyond reason. It edits your code when you don't ask, removing things you just started; it lacks iterators -- every time you must write a big cycle instead. It lacks simple things like check if a key exists in a map.
Proponents say it has nothing under the hood. I see under-the-hood-magic happen every time.
1) The arrays append is one example. Try removing an element from an array - you must rely on some magic and awkward syntax, and there's no clear explanation what actually happens under the hood (all docs just show you that a slice is a pointer to a piece of vector).
2) enums creation is just nonsense
3) To make matters worse, at work we have a linter that forbids merging a branch if you a) don't do if err != nil for every case b) have >20 for & if/else clauses. This makes you split functions in many pieces, turning your code into enterprise Java.
It feels like, to implement same things, Go is 2x slower than in Rust.
On the positive side,
* interfaces are simpler, without some stricter Rust's limitations; the only problem with them is that in the using code, you can't tell one from a struct
* it's really fast to pick up, I needed just couple of days to see examples and start coding stuff.
I think Go would have been great with
* proper enums (I'll be fine if they have no wrapped data)
* sensible arrays & slices, without any magic and awkward syntax
One thing Go took from C that I dislike: overly short variable names (like in interface names when implementing function are usually 1 or 2 letters, but also chan!).
Other random things I hate:
- first element in a struct, if unnamed, acts like extending a struct;
- private/public fields of method based on capitalisation (it makes json mapping to a struct have so much boilerplate);
- default json lib being so inept with collections: an empty slice is serialised as null/absent (empty list is not absence of a list, WTF, but the new json lib promises to fix that json crap);
- error type being special, and not working well with chanels;
- lambda syntax is verbose;
- panics (especially the ones in libs);
- using internal proxy in companies for packages download is very fiddly, and sucks.
But, the tooling is pretty good and fast, I won’t lie. The language won’t win beauty contests for sure, but it mostly does the job. Still weak at building http servers (limited http server libs with good default headers, very limited openapi spec support).
I worked on a toy programming language (that compile down to golang), which is a fork of the go lexer/parser, but it changes how functions can only return one value allowing the use of Result[T]/Option[T] and error propagation operators `!` and `?`.
It has enums (sum type), tuple, built-in Set[T], and good Iterator methods. It has very nice type inferred lambda function (heavily inspired by the swift syntax)... lots of good stuff!
> It lacks simple things like check if a key exists in a map.
What? `value, keyExists := myMap[someKey]`
> Try removing an element from an array - you must rely on some magic and awkward syntax, and there's no clear explanation what actually happens under the hood (all docs just show you that a slice is a pointer to a piece of vector).
First of all, if you're removing elements from the middle of an array, you're using the wrong data structure 99% of the time. If you're doing that in a loop, you're hitting degenerate performance.
If I don't need the value, I have to do awkward tricks with this construct. like `if _, key_exists := my_may[key]; key_exists { ... }`.
Also, you can do `value := myMap[someKey]`, and it will just return a value or nil.
Also, if the map has arrays as elements, it will magically create one, like Python's defaultdict.
This construct (assigning from map subscript) is pure magic, despite all the claims, that there's none in Golang.
...And also: I guess the idea was to make the language minimal and easy to learn, hence primitives have no methods on them. But... after all OOP in limited form is there in Golang, exactly like in Rust. And I don't see the point why custom structs do have methods, and it's easier to use, but basic ones don't, and you have to go import packages.
Not that it's wrong. But it's not easier at all, and learning curve just moves to another place.
Go has iterators, had them for a while now. To delete an element from a slice you can use `slices.Delete`.
>3) To make matters worse, at work we have a linter that forbids merging a branch if you a) don't do if err != nil for every case b) have >20 for & if/else clauses. This makes you split functions in many pieces, turning your code into enterprise Java.
It has proper enums. Granted, it lacks an enum keyword, which seems to trip up many.
Perhaps what you are actually looking for is sum types? Given that you mentioned Rust, which weirdly[1] uses the enum keyword for sum types, this seems likely. Go does indeed lack that. Sum types are not enums, though.
> sensible arrays & slices, without any magic and awkward syntax
Its arrays and slices are exactly the same as how you would find it in C. So it is true that confuses many coming from languages that wrap them in incredible amounts of magic, but the issue you point to here is actually a lack of magic. Any improvements to help those who are accustomed to magic would require adding magic, not taking it away.
> iterators
Is there something about them that you find lacking? They don't seem really any different than iterators in other languages that I can see, although I'll grant you that the anonymous function pattern is a bit unconventional. It is fine, though.
> result unwrapping shorthands
Go wants to add this, and has been trying to for years, but nobody has explained how to do it sensibly. There are all kinds of surface solutions that get 50% of the way there, but nobody wants to tackle the other 50%. You can't force someone to roll up their sleeves, I guess.
[1] Rust uses enums to generate the sum type tag as an implementation detail, so its not quite as weird as it originally seems, but still rather strange that it would name it based on an effectively hidden implementation detail instead of naming it by what the user is actually trying to accomplish. Most likely it started with proper enums and then realized that sum types would be better instead and never thought to change the keyword to go along with that change.
But then again Swift did the same thing, so who knows? To be fair, its "enums" can degrade to proper enums in order to be compatible with Objective-C, so while not a very good reason, at least you can maybe find some kind of understanding in their thinking in that case. Rust, though...
Well, then they look awkward and have give a feel like it's a syntax abuse.
> Its arrays and slices are exactly the same as how you would do it in C. So while it is true that trips up many coming from languages that wrap them in incredible amounts of magic, but the issue you point to here is actually a lack of magic.
In Rust, I see exactly what I work with -- a proper vector, material thing, or a slice, which is a view into a vector. Also, a slice in Rust is always contiguous, it starts from element a and finishes at element b. I can remove an arbitrary element from a middle of a vector, but slice is read-only, and I simply can't. I can push (append) only to a vector. I can insert in the middle of a vector -- and the doc warns me that it'll need to shift every element after it forward. There's just zero magic.
In Go instead, how do I insert an element in the middle of an array? I see suggestions like `myarray[:123] + []MyType{my_element} + myarray[123:]`. (Removing is like myarray[:123] + myarray[124:]`.)
What do I deal in this code with, and what do I get afterwards? Is this a sophisticated slice that keeps 3 views, 2 to myarray and 1 to the anonymous one?
The docs on the internet suggest that slices in go are exactly like in Rust, a contiguous sequence of array's elements. If so, in my example of inserting (as well as when deleting), there must be a lot happening under the hood.
I wish Go had sum types too. But I like being able to write a mutable tree structure without first having to read a whole book on the subject and inventing a new system of pointers. Every language is tradeoffs.
The introduction of automatic code modernizers to keep legacy code up to date with modern Go idioms is interesting:
> With gopls v0.18.0, we began exploring automatic code modernizers. As Go evolves, every release brings new capabilities and new idioms; new and better ways to do things that Go programmers have been finding other ways to do. Go stands by its compatibility promise—the old way will continue to work in perpetuity—but nevertheless this creates a bifurcation between old idioms and new idioms. Modernizers are static analysis tools that recognize old idioms and suggest faster, more readable, more secure, more modern replacements, and do so with push-button reliability. What gofmt did for stylistic consistency, we hope modernizers can do for idiomatic consistency.
Modernizers seem like a way make Large-Scale Changes (LSCs) more available to the masses. Google has internal tooling to support them [1], but now Go users get a limited form of opt-in LSC support whenever modernizers make a suggestion.
The Go codebases look all alike.
Not only the language has really few primitives but also the code conventions enforced by standard library, gofmt, and golangci-lint implies that the structure of code bases are very similar.
Many language communities can't even agree on the build tooling.
I'm still trying to convince the scientists I work with that they should format their code or use linters. Making them mandatory in Go was a good decision.
i've just started learning Go and i really like this aspect. one way to do things, one way to format.. the % operator is a bit confusing for a negative number - that took me down a little rabbit-hole, learning about how a remainder can be different to how i normally think about it.
One thing I don't like when it comes to Golang jobs - it is rare to see pure software engineering positions. For some reason, most Go jobs requirements include AWS, Kubernetes/Docker, CI/CD setup, etc... DevOps stuff, which is not the case for positions in other stacks.
I haven't been able to find a job anywhere, using any language, that didn't require all that stuff these days. I wish I could go back to pure development, but now we all get this entire infra-crap thrown at us too. Which then means... you support the environments, the runtime, and the code. It's a 24/7 world and I don't care for it anymore.
I was very skeptical of Go when I started learning it, but it quickly became my favourite language. I like how simple but powerful it is.
If I had a magic wand, the only things I would add is better nulability checks, add stack traces by default for errors, and exhaustive checks for sum types. Other than that, it does everything I want.
I love Go. It makes that I get shit done. I picked up Go more than ten years ago, because it was HN’s darling and when I didn’t know about hype cycles. No regrets.
I like Go. Coming from Python, I appreciate having most things be explicit in nature vs. magical, and having concurrency not feel like a bolted on nightmare.
Writing microservices at $DAYJOB feels far easier and less guess-work, even if it requires more upfront code, because it’s clear what each piece does and why.
Go is my favorite programming language. I remember when I first found Go and it was because I was using Java back then and learnign Akka framework for concurrent programming . I realized Go was so much less code compared to Java and I could understand it effortlessly. Since then I have been using it very regularly but still I don't feel I am good at this language. But it helps me get the work done. Cheers to the 16th anniversary of Go.
Go would probably be my favorite language if it just had a few more features around functional programming. Specifically around immutability and nullness, and maybe exhaustive switch statements. Then it just might be perfect.
At work we use Uber’s NillAway, so that helps bit. https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway Though actually having the type system handle it would be nicer.
Go with Sum types and no nil pointers would be fantastic! Is it too much to dream of?
It feels like Gleam gets pretty close but it flies off in a bunch of other directions.
I tried to use go in a project 6-7 years ago and was kind of shocked by needing to fetch packages directly from source control with a real absence of built in versioning. That turned me off and I went back to python. I gather that now there’s a new system with go modules. I should probably revisit it.
I use Go every day at work and it's still the first thing I reach for when completing personal projects. It gets better every year. Keep up the good work Go team!
When you turn on exhaustive, exhaustruct and wrapcheck linters in golangci-lint. You get such a massive safety boost and it makes you fly through writing Go.
Glad to see that the bowling development team is focusing on deterministic tooling like language server protocol in gopls and using static analysis for automatically restoring code with go fix.
Recently I made the same assertions as to Go's advantage for LLM/AI orchestration.
It would not surprise me that Google (being the massive services company that it is) would have sent an internal memo instructing teams not to use the Python tool chain to produce production agents or tooling and use Golang.
Even 15 years ago or so when Guido was still there I recall being told "we aren't supposed to write any new services in Python. It starts easy, then things get messy and end up needing to be rewritten." I recall it mostly being perf and tooling support, but also lack of typing, which has changed since then, so maybe they've gotten more accepting.
Been writing Python code for over twenty years, and using it for personal and work projects, not mainly, but to suppport my work. Recently I ported some of my code to Go and was blown away: Cross compiler, creating binaries, concurrency done right, super fast code. I come very late to the party, and writing software is not my main job, but Go is such a nice complement for my toolbelt. Python for prototyping or writing small services with fastapi, go for network realted stuff, serving lots of users. Super happy with this.
And I am wondering if Rust would be a good addition. Or rather go with Typescript to complement Python and Go.
I recently finished my first ever side gig in Go - a web platform that organizes business processes between multiple actors. Got paid and more feature requests are coming in. Fronted with Caddy, the whole thing runs flawlessly on a $5 VPS. I love Go.
It has been my go to language since 2020. I was given a task to complete in a week and my lead told just go through Go playground and write the code (it was some snmp receiver/transmit stuff). To my surprise it was so easy to learn, write and more importantly test. Only recent thing i have not learned is generics, hopefully will get their sooner. Coming from java background the things Go did felt so clever and just too good to believe
I'm thankful for Go because it was an easy first introduction to static typing.
I remember making a little web app and seeing the type errors pop up magically in all he right places where I missed things in my structs. It was a life-changing experience.
I am not really familiar with Go but I wonder where it would be without Google's support and maintenance. I have no doubt it is a solid language with some really smart people in programming language design behind it.
It is so much easy to release programming language but so much difficult to maintain and curate it over time.
Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but doesn't make sense for most applications because it complicates the development experience unnecessarily and monoliths are also easier to debug.
I would not use Golang for a big codebase with lots of business logic. Golang has not made a dent in Java usage at big companies, no large company is going to try replacing their Java codebases with Golang because there's no benefit, Java is almost as fast as Golang and has classes and actually has a richer set of concurrency primitives.
Microservices are entirely unrelated to classes and in no way endemic to go.
Go’s lack of inheritance is one of its bolder decisions and I think has been proven entirely correct in use.
Instead of the incidental complexity encouraged by pointless inheritance hierarchies we go back to structure which bundle data and behaviour and can compose them instead.
Favouring composition over inheritance is not a new idea nor did it come from the authors of Go.
Also the author of Java (Gosling) disagrees with you.
The solution to bad abstractions it not to make it very difficult to create abstractions at all. For systems code I think it's fine but for application code you probably want some abstractions or else it's very hard to scale a codebase.
Been happily working in Go since 2014. My career has spanned C, Python, C#, Ruby, and a smattering of other languages, but am always quite fond and preferential towards Go.
"Man I love Go, it's so simple, plenty fast, really easy to pick up, read, and write. I really love that it doesn't have dozens of esoteric features for my colleagues to big brain into the codebase"
"Oh yeah? Well Go sucks, it doesn't have dozens of esoteric features for me to big brain into the codebase"
I remember when Go was born, then, it turned out there was already another programming language called "Go!", but nobody cared, and everybody forgot about that other Go!. So, happy birthday, Go, and rest in peace, Go!
Oh wow, so it's already been 16 years since Google steamrolled the Go! language, which had existed a decade before Go and had every right to the name. This was when they were still pretending "do no evil" was their brand.
There may be no honor amongst thieves but there is honor amongst langdevs, and when they did Go! dirty, Google made clear which one they are.
Go! was clearly a toy language created only for the purpose of writing papers. It has no applications outside academia. Meanwhile Google's golang exists mostly in the sphere of practical use.
Go! wasn't even published as its own project [1] until 2015, well after Go(lang) was available. It previously existed as an unpublished CVS repository in an obscure Sourceforge project [2]; I can't fault the Go developers for ignoring or overlooking it. You can find a circa-2002 version of Go! in the archived CVS repository of the Sourceforge project, but none of the project's release files appear to contain it.
(Ignore the "Last Update: 2013-09-06" on the project page - that's the date that SourceForge performed an automatic migration. Any real activity on the project seems to have petered out around 2002, with one final file released in 2003.)
That's not the point, no one uses 99% of languages, so if that's the standard then it's a free-for-all. The PL community is small, so norms are important.
PL naming code is:
1. Whoever uses the name first, has claim to the name. Using the name first is measured by: when was the spec published, or when is the first repo commit.
2. A name can be reused IFF the author has abandoned the original project. Usually there's a grace period depending on how long the project was under development. But if a project is abandoned then there's nothing to stop someone from picking up the name.
3. Under no circumstances should a PL dev step on the name of a currently active PL project. If that happens, it's up to the most recently named project to change their name, not the older project even if the newer project has money behind it.
4. Language names with historical notoriety are essentially "retired" despite not being actively developed anymore.
All of this is reasonable, because the PL namespace is still largely unsaturated*. There are plenty of one syllable English words that are out there for grabs. All sorts of animals, verbs, nouns, and human names that are common for PLs are there for the taking. There's no reason to step on someone else's work just because there's some tie in with your company's branding.
So it's pretty bottom basement behavior for luminaries like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike to cosign Google throwing around their weight to step on another dev's work, and then say essentially "make me" when asked to stop.
* This of course does not apply to the single-letter langs, but even still, that namespace doesn't really have 25 langs under active development.
Which obscures the type, making it harder to read the code. The only justification is that 16 years ago, some guy thought he was being clever. For 99.99% of code, it’s a worse syntax. Nobody does eight levels of pointer redirection in typical everyday code.
"x: int
p: pointer to int
a: array[3] of int
These declarations are clear, if verbose - you just read them left to right. Go takes its cue from here, but in the interests of brevity it drops the colon and removes some of the keywords
"
And in the process makes it significantly harder for human eyes to find the boundary between identifier and type.
16 years is a bit of an under-estimate. I think the first popular language with this form of declaration was Pascal.
var
foo: char;
Go was developed by many of the minds behind C, and inertia would have led them to C-style declaration. I don't know if they've ever told anybody why they went with the Pascal style, but I would bet money on the fact that Pascal-style declarations are simply easier and faster for computers to parse. And it doesn't just help with compile speed, it also makes syntax highlighting far more reliable and speeds up tooling.
Sure, it's initially kind of annoying if you're used to the C style of type before identifier, but it's something you can quickly get to grips with. And as time has gone on, it seems like a style that a lot of modern languages have adopted. Off the top of my head, I think this style is in TypeScript, Python type hints, Go, Rust, Nim, Zig, and Odin. I asked Claude for a few more examples and apparently it's also used by Kotlin, Swift, and various flavors of ML and Haskell.
But hey, if you're still a fan of type before variable, PHP has your back.
class User {
public int $id;
public ?string $name;
public function __construct(int $id, ?string $name) {
$this->id = $id;
$this->name = $name;
}
}
I have no problem with ident: type. I have problem with dropping the colon between them for no good reason, even though there used to be 2 quite well-established patterns every language adhered to.
Golang exists in this weird place where it's similar enough to C so that intuition connects it with C, but at the same time different enough that you keep tripping over.
I love Go. One thing I haven't seen noted here is how great it is for use in monorepos. Adding a new application is just a matter of making a folder and putting a main packaged go file with a main() func. Running go install at the root ./.. takes care of compiling everything quickly and easily.
This combined with the ease of building CLI programs has been an absolute godsend in the past when I've had to quickly spin up CLI tools which use business logic code to fix things.
I don't understand how this isn't also true for practically every other language?
It’s not true of C/C++ which need changes to the build system. Also true for rust workspaces which is how I’d recommend structuring monorepos although it is generally easy (you just need to add a small cargo.toml file) or you can not use a workspace but you still need to declare the binary if I recall correctly.
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The distinction, I believe, is between "possible" and "easy". Go makes a lot of very specific things easy via some of its design choices with language and tooling.
As a counter example, it seems like e.g. c++ is mostly concerned about making things possible and rarely about easy.
Agreed. This use case is not mentioned enough.
I know they say that your programming language isn't the bottleneck, but I remember sitting there being frustrated as a young dev that I couldn't parse faster in the languages I was using when I learned about Go.
It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them)
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time: gotchas, concurrency stuff, everything. There is something very comforting about knowing the entire spec of a language.
I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++, and inevitably you'll come across some obscure thing and have to context switch out of reading code to learn whatever the fuck a "partial method" or "generic delegate" means, and then keep reading that codebase if you still have momentum left.
> The nice thing about Go is that you can learn "all of it" in a reasonable amount of time
This always feels like one of those “taste” things that some programmers tend to like on a personal level but has almost no evidence that it leads to more real-world success vs any other language.
Like, people get real work done every day at scale with C# and C++. And Java, and Ruby, and Rust, and JavaScript. And every other language that programmers castigate as being huge and bloated.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to have a preference for smaller languages, I just haven’t seen anything in my career to indicate that smaller languages outperform when it comes to faster delivery or less bugs.
As an aside, I’d even go so far as to say that the main problem with C++ is not that it has so many features in number, but that its features interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Said another way, it’s not the number of nodes in the graph, but the number of edges and the manner of those edges.
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I've been writing go professionally for about ten years, and with go I regularly find myself saying "this is pretty boring", followed by "but that's a good thing" because I'm pretty sure that I won't do anything in a go program that would cause the other team members much trouble if I were to get run over by a bus or die of boredom.
In contrast writing C++ feels like solving an endless series of puzzles, and there is a constant temptation to do Something Really Clever.
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I learned Go this year, and this assertion just... isn't true? There are a bunch of subtleties and footguns, especially with concurrency.
C++ is a basket case, it's not really a fair comparison.
The tradeoff with that language simplicity is that there's a whole lot of gotchas that come with Go. It makes things look simpler than they actually are.
> I'm convinced no more than a handful of humans understand all of C# or C++
How would the proportion of humans that understand all of Rust compare?
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This is also what I like about JS, except it's even easier than Go. Meanwhile Python has a surprising number of random features.
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I’ve been using Python since 2008, and I don’t feel like I understand very much of it at all, but after just a couple of years of using Go in a hobby capacity I felt I knew it very well.
> Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them
I think go is fairly small, too, but “size of spec” is not always a good measure for that. Some specs are very tight, others fairly loose, and tightness makes specs larger (example: Swift’s language reference doesn’t even claim to define the full language. https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...: “The grammar described here is intended to help you understand the language in more detail, rather than to allow you to directly implement a parser or compiler.”)
(Also, browsing golang’s spec, I think I spotted an error in https://go.dev/ref/spec#Integer_literals. The grammar says:
Given that, how can 0600 and 0_600 be valid integer literals in the examples?)
You're looking at the wrong production. They are octal literals:
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0600 and 0_600 are octal literals:
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My original comment was incorrect. These are being parsed as octals, not decimals: https://go.dev/play/p/hyWPkL_9C5W
Well that's good, since Go was specifically designed for juniors.
From Rob Pike himself: "It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."
However, the main design goal was to reduce build times at Google. This is why unused dependencies are a compile time error.
https://go.dev/talks/2012/splash.article#TOC_6.
I feel like people always take the designed for juniors thing the wrong way by implying that beneficial (to general software engineering) features or ideas were left out as a trade off to make the language easier to learn at the cost of what the language could be to a senior. I don't think the go designers see these as opposing trade offs.
Whats good for the junior can be good for the senior. I think PL values have leaned a little too hard towards valuing complexity and abstract 'purity' while go was a break away from that that has proved successful but controversial.
> This is why unused dependencies are a compile time error.
https://go.dev/doc/faq?utm_source=chatgpt.com#unused_variabl...
> There are two reasons for having no warnings. First, if it’s worth complaining about, it’s worth fixing in the code. (Conversely, if it’s not worth fixing, it’s not worth mentioning.) Second, having the compiler generate warnings encourages the implementation to warn about weak cases that can make compilation noisy, masking real errors that should be fixed.
I believe this was a mistake (one that sadly Zig also follows). In practice there are too many things that wouldn't make sense being compiler errors, so you need to run a linter. When you need to comment out or remove some code temporarily, it won't even build, and then you have to remove a chain of unused vars/imports until it let's you, it's just annoying.
Meanwhile, unlinted go programs are full of little bugs, e.g. unchecked errors or bugs in err-var misuse. If there only were warnings...
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> This is why unused dependencies are a compile time error.
I think my favourite bit of Go opinionatedness is the code formatting.
K&R or GTFO.
Oh you don't like your opening bracket on the same line? Tough shit, syntax error.
Doesn't Google use mostly C++?
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Unfortunately, it's the remaining 20% of Rust features that provide 80% of its usefulness.
I don't understand the framing you have here, of Rust being an asymptote of language capability. It isn't. It's its own set of tradeoffs. In 2025, it would not make much sense to write a browser in Go. But there are a lot of network services it doesn't really make sense to write in Rust: you give up a lot (colored functions, the borrow checker) to avoid GC and goroutines.
Rust is great. One of the stupidest things in modern programming practice is the slapfight between these two language communities.
Go is getting more complex over time though. E.g. generics.
Language can be bottleneck if there's something huge missing from it that you need, like how many of them didn't have first class support for cooperative multitasking, or maybe you need it to be compiled, or not compiled, or GC vs no GC. Go started out with solid greenthreading, while afaik no major lang/runtime had something comparable at the time (Java now does supposedly).
The thing people tend to overvalue is the little syntax differences, like how Scala wanted to be a nicer Java, or even ObjC vs Swift before the latter got async/await.
I'll be the one to nickpick, but Scala never intended to be a nicer Java. It was and still is an academic exercise in compiler and language theory. Also, judging by Kotlin's decent strides, "little Syntex differences" get you a long way on a competent VM/Runtime/stdlib.
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It really is a lovely language and ecosystem of tools, I think it does show its limitations fairly quickly when you want to build something a bit complex though. Really wish they would have added sumtypes
>> I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
By 20% of the effort, do you mean learning curve or productivity?
I write a lot of Go, a bit of Rust, and Zig is slowly creeping in.
To add to the above comment, a lot of what Go does encourages readability... Yes it feels pedantic at moments (error handling), but those cultural, and stylistic elements that seem painful to write make reading better.
Portable binaries are a blessing, fast compile times, and the choices made around 3rd party libraries and vendoring are all just icing on the cake.
That 80 percent feeling is more than just the language, as written, its all the things that come along with it...
Error handling is objectively terrible in Go and the explicitness of the always repeating pattern just makes humans pay less attention to potentially problematic lines and otherwise increases the noise to signal ratio.
Error handling isn't even a pain to write any more with AI autocomplete which gets it right 95%+ of the time in my experience.
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Similar story for me. I was looking for a language that just got out of the way. That didn’t require me to learn a full imparable DSL just to add a few dependencies and which could easily produce some artifact that I could share around without needing to make sure the target machine had all the right dependencies installed.
> I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
I don't see it. Can you say what 80% you feel like you're getting?
The type system doesn't feel anything alike, I guess the syntax is alike in the sense that Go is a semi-colon language and Rust though actually basically an ML deliberately dresses as a semi-colon language but otherwise not really. They're both relatively modern, so you get decent tooling out of the box.
But this feels a bit like if somebody told me that this new pizza restaurant does a cheese pizza that's 80% similar to the Duck Ho Fun from that little place near the extremely tacky student bar. Duck Ho Fun doesn't have nothing in common with cheese pizza, they're both best (in my opinion) if cooked very quickly with high heat - but there's not a lot of commonality.
> I don't see it. Can you say what 80% you feel like you're getting?
I read it as “80% of the way to Rust levels of reliability and performance.” That doesn’t mean that the type system or syntax is at all similar, but that you get some of the same benefits.
I might say that, “C gets you 80% of the way to assembly with 20% of the effort.” From context, you could make a reasonable guess that I’m talking about performance.
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I guess the 80% would be a reasonably performant compiled binary with easily managed dependencies? And the extra 20% would be the additional performance and peace of mind provided by the strictness of the Rust compiler.
Single binary deployment was a big deal when Go was young; that might be worth a few percent. Also: automatically avoiding entire categories of potential vulnerabilities due to language-level design choices and features. Not compile times though ;)
Wild guess but, with the current JS/python dominance, maybe it’s just the benefits of a (modern) compiled language.
To me, Go is like Rust oversimplified beyond reason. It edits your code when you don't ask, removing things you just started; it lacks iterators -- every time you must write a big cycle instead. It lacks simple things like check if a key exists in a map.
Proponents say it has nothing under the hood. I see under-the-hood-magic happen every time.
1) The arrays append is one example. Try removing an element from an array - you must rely on some magic and awkward syntax, and there's no clear explanation what actually happens under the hood (all docs just show you that a slice is a pointer to a piece of vector).
2) enums creation is just nonsense
3) To make matters worse, at work we have a linter that forbids merging a branch if you a) don't do if err != nil for every case b) have >20 for & if/else clauses. This makes you split functions in many pieces, turning your code into enterprise Java.
It feels like, to implement same things, Go is 2x slower than in Rust.
On the positive side,
* interfaces are simpler, without some stricter Rust's limitations; the only problem with them is that in the using code, you can't tell one from a struct
* it's really fast to pick up, I needed just couple of days to see examples and start coding stuff.
I think Go would have been great with
* proper enums (I'll be fine if they have no wrapped data)
* sensible arrays & slices, without any magic and awkward syntax
* iterators
* result unwrapping shorthands
One thing Go took from C that I dislike: overly short variable names (like in interface names when implementing function are usually 1 or 2 letters, but also chan!).
Other random things I hate:
- first element in a struct, if unnamed, acts like extending a struct;
- private/public fields of method based on capitalisation (it makes json mapping to a struct have so much boilerplate);
- default json lib being so inept with collections: an empty slice is serialised as null/absent (empty list is not absence of a list, WTF, but the new json lib promises to fix that json crap);
- error type being special, and not working well with chanels;
- lambda syntax is verbose;
- panics (especially the ones in libs);
- using internal proxy in companies for packages download is very fiddly, and sucks.
But, the tooling is pretty good and fast, I won’t lie. The language won’t win beauty contests for sure, but it mostly does the job. Still weak at building http servers (limited http server libs with good default headers, very limited openapi spec support).
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I worked on a toy programming language (that compile down to golang), which is a fork of the go lexer/parser, but it changes how functions can only return one value allowing the use of Result[T]/Option[T] and error propagation operators `!` and `?`.
It has enums (sum type), tuple, built-in Set[T], and good Iterator methods. It has very nice type inferred lambda function (heavily inspired by the swift syntax)... lots of good stuff!
https://github.com/alaingilbert/agl
> it lacks iterators -- every time you must write a big cycle instead
It has iterators - https://pkg.go.dev/iter.
> It lacks simple things like check if a key exists in a map.
What? `value, keyExists := myMap[someKey]`
> Try removing an element from an array - you must rely on some magic and awkward syntax, and there's no clear explanation what actually happens under the hood (all docs just show you that a slice is a pointer to a piece of vector).
First of all, if you're removing elements from the middle of an array, you're using the wrong data structure 99% of the time. If you're doing that in a loop, you're hitting degenerate performance.
Second, https://pkg.go.dev/slices#Delete
> `value, keyExists := myMap[someKey]`
If I don't need the value, I have to do awkward tricks with this construct. like `if _, key_exists := my_may[key]; key_exists { ... }`.
Also, you can do `value := myMap[someKey]`, and it will just return a value or nil.
Also, if the map has arrays as elements, it will magically create one, like Python's defaultdict.
This construct (assigning from map subscript) is pure magic, despite all the claims, that there's none in Golang.
...And also: I guess the idea was to make the language minimal and easy to learn, hence primitives have no methods on them. But... after all OOP in limited form is there in Golang, exactly like in Rust. And I don't see the point why custom structs do have methods, and it's easier to use, but basic ones don't, and you have to go import packages.
Not that it's wrong. But it's not easier at all, and learning curve just moves to another place.
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Go has iterators, had them for a while now. To delete an element from a slice you can use `slices.Delete`.
>3) To make matters worse, at work we have a linter that forbids merging a branch if you a) don't do if err != nil for every case b) have >20 for & if/else clauses. This makes you split functions in many pieces, turning your code into enterprise Java.
That is not a problem with Go.
> This makes you split functions in many pieces, turning your code into enterprise Java.
Umm..in Java you won't have to split functions here. Maybe you should study some modern Java ?
> proper enums
It has proper enums. Granted, it lacks an enum keyword, which seems to trip up many.
Perhaps what you are actually looking for is sum types? Given that you mentioned Rust, which weirdly[1] uses the enum keyword for sum types, this seems likely. Go does indeed lack that. Sum types are not enums, though.
> sensible arrays & slices, without any magic and awkward syntax
Its arrays and slices are exactly the same as how you would find it in C. So it is true that confuses many coming from languages that wrap them in incredible amounts of magic, but the issue you point to here is actually a lack of magic. Any improvements to help those who are accustomed to magic would require adding magic, not taking it away.
> iterators
Is there something about them that you find lacking? They don't seem really any different than iterators in other languages that I can see, although I'll grant you that the anonymous function pattern is a bit unconventional. It is fine, though.
> result unwrapping shorthands
Go wants to add this, and has been trying to for years, but nobody has explained how to do it sensibly. There are all kinds of surface solutions that get 50% of the way there, but nobody wants to tackle the other 50%. You can't force someone to roll up their sleeves, I guess.
[1] Rust uses enums to generate the sum type tag as an implementation detail, so its not quite as weird as it originally seems, but still rather strange that it would name it based on an effectively hidden implementation detail instead of naming it by what the user is actually trying to accomplish. Most likely it started with proper enums and then realized that sum types would be better instead and never thought to change the keyword to go along with that change.
But then again Swift did the same thing, so who knows? To be fair, its "enums" can degrade to proper enums in order to be compatible with Objective-C, so while not a very good reason, at least you can maybe find some kind of understanding in their thinking in that case. Rust, though...
> It has proper enums.
Well, then they look awkward and have give a feel like it's a syntax abuse.
> Its arrays and slices are exactly the same as how you would do it in C. So while it is true that trips up many coming from languages that wrap them in incredible amounts of magic, but the issue you point to here is actually a lack of magic.
In Rust, I see exactly what I work with -- a proper vector, material thing, or a slice, which is a view into a vector. Also, a slice in Rust is always contiguous, it starts from element a and finishes at element b. I can remove an arbitrary element from a middle of a vector, but slice is read-only, and I simply can't. I can push (append) only to a vector. I can insert in the middle of a vector -- and the doc warns me that it'll need to shift every element after it forward. There's just zero magic.
In Go instead, how do I insert an element in the middle of an array? I see suggestions like `myarray[:123] + []MyType{my_element} + myarray[123:]`. (Removing is like myarray[:123] + myarray[124:]`.)
What do I deal in this code with, and what do I get afterwards? Is this a sophisticated slice that keeps 3 views, 2 to myarray and 1 to the anonymous one?
The docs on the internet suggest that slices in go are exactly like in Rust, a contiguous sequence of array's elements. If so, in my example of inserting (as well as when deleting), there must be a lot happening under the hood.
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I wish Go had sum types too. But I like being able to write a mutable tree structure without first having to read a whole book on the subject and inventing a new system of pointers. Every language is tradeoffs.
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The introduction of automatic code modernizers to keep legacy code up to date with modern Go idioms is interesting:
> With gopls v0.18.0, we began exploring automatic code modernizers. As Go evolves, every release brings new capabilities and new idioms; new and better ways to do things that Go programmers have been finding other ways to do. Go stands by its compatibility promise—the old way will continue to work in perpetuity—but nevertheless this creates a bifurcation between old idioms and new idioms. Modernizers are static analysis tools that recognize old idioms and suggest faster, more readable, more secure, more modern replacements, and do so with push-button reliability. What gofmt did for stylistic consistency, we hope modernizers can do for idiomatic consistency.
Modernizers seem like a way make Large-Scale Changes (LSCs) more available to the masses. Google has internal tooling to support them [1], but now Go users get a limited form of opt-in LSC support whenever modernizers make a suggestion.
[1] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch22.html
Contributing to a new Go codebase is easy.
The Go codebases look all alike. Not only the language has really few primitives but also the code conventions enforced by standard library, gofmt, and golangci-lint implies that the structure of code bases are very similar.
Many language communities can't even agree on the build tooling.
I like that I can understand a Go file without deciphering 15 layers of macros.
I'm still trying to convince the scientists I work with that they should format their code or use linters. Making them mandatory in Go was a good decision.
> I'm still trying to convince the scientists I work with that they should format their code or use linters.
Consider adding a pre-commit hook if you are allowed to.
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i've just started learning Go and i really like this aspect. one way to do things, one way to format.. the % operator is a bit confusing for a negative number - that took me down a little rabbit-hole, learning about how a remainder can be different to how i normally think about it.
10 week onboarding program we use here for go backend devs: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1eiea6q/10_week_pla...
go is amazing. switches from python to go 7 years ago. It's the reason our startup did well
One thing I don't like when it comes to Golang jobs - it is rare to see pure software engineering positions. For some reason, most Go jobs requirements include AWS, Kubernetes/Docker, CI/CD setup, etc... DevOps stuff, which is not the case for positions in other stacks.
I haven't been able to find a job anywhere, using any language, that didn't require all that stuff these days. I wish I could go back to pure development, but now we all get this entire infra-crap thrown at us too. Which then means... you support the environments, the runtime, and the code. It's a 24/7 world and I don't care for it anymore.
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Direct link
https://stream-wiki.notion.site/Stream-Go-10-Week-Backend-En...
I was very skeptical of Go when I started learning it, but it quickly became my favourite language. I like how simple but powerful it is.
If I had a magic wand, the only things I would add is better nulability checks, add stack traces by default for errors, and exhaustive checks for sum types. Other than that, it does everything I want.
> better nulability checks
In development: https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway
> exhaustive checks for sum types
Linters such as https://golangci-lint.run will do this for you.
I love Go. It makes that I get shit done. I picked up Go more than ten years ago, because it was HN’s darling and when I didn’t know about hype cycles. No regrets.
I like Go. Coming from Python, I appreciate having most things be explicit in nature vs. magical, and having concurrency not feel like a bolted on nightmare.
Writing microservices at $DAYJOB feels far easier and less guess-work, even if it requires more upfront code, because it’s clear what each piece does and why.
I've finally gotten around to learning Go this year and I'm having a pretty similar experience.
It really feels like a simpler language and ecosystem compared to Python. On top of that, it performs much better!
Go is my favorite programming language. I remember when I first found Go and it was because I was using Java back then and learnign Akka framework for concurrent programming . I realized Go was so much less code compared to Java and I could understand it effortlessly. Since then I have been using it very regularly but still I don't feel I am good at this language. But it helps me get the work done. Cheers to the 16th anniversary of Go.
Go would probably be my favorite language if it just had a few more features around functional programming. Specifically around immutability and nullness, and maybe exhaustive switch statements. Then it just might be perfect.
At work we use Uber’s NillAway, so that helps bit. https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway Though actually having the type system handle it would be nicer.
There is borgo https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo but it's not yet mature and not being actively developed
Go with Sum types and no nil pointers would be fantastic! Is it too much to dream of? It feels like Gleam gets pretty close but it flies off in a bunch of other directions.
vlang is pretty much this
I tried to use go in a project 6-7 years ago and was kind of shocked by needing to fetch packages directly from source control with a real absence of built in versioning. That turned me off and I went back to python. I gather that now there’s a new system with go modules. I should probably revisit it.
I use Go every day at work and it's still the first thing I reach for when completing personal projects. It gets better every year. Keep up the good work Go team!
I'm glad Go exists. If nothing else, it cemented that tooling is at least as important as the language.
When you turn on exhaustive, exhaustruct and wrapcheck linters in golangci-lint. You get such a massive safety boost and it makes you fly through writing Go.
Glad to see that the bowling development team is focusing on deterministic tooling like language server protocol in gopls and using static analysis for automatically restoring code with go fix.
Recently I made the same assertions as to Go's advantage for LLM/AI orchestration.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895897
It would not surprise me that Google (being the massive services company that it is) would have sent an internal memo instructing teams not to use the Python tool chain to produce production agents or tooling and use Golang.
Even 15 years ago or so when Guido was still there I recall being told "we aren't supposed to write any new services in Python. It starts easy, then things get messy and end up needing to be rewritten." I recall it mostly being perf and tooling support, but also lack of typing, which has changed since then, so maybe they've gotten more accepting.
And here I was anticipating a release of Go for the Apple ][ computer[16]
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16
It might be possible. TinyGo exists, and can target some devices with even less memory than the Apple II, like the ATmega328 microcontroller.
Been writing Python code for over twenty years, and using it for personal and work projects, not mainly, but to suppport my work. Recently I ported some of my code to Go and was blown away: Cross compiler, creating binaries, concurrency done right, super fast code. I come very late to the party, and writing software is not my main job, but Go is such a nice complement for my toolbelt. Python for prototyping or writing small services with fastapi, go for network realted stuff, serving lots of users. Super happy with this.
And I am wondering if Rust would be a good addition. Or rather go with Typescript to complement Python and Go.
I recently finished my first ever side gig in Go - a web platform that organizes business processes between multiple actors. Got paid and more feature requests are coming in. Fronted with Caddy, the whole thing runs flawlessly on a $5 VPS. I love Go.
It has been my go to language since 2020. I was given a task to complete in a week and my lead told just go through Go playground and write the code (it was some snmp receiver/transmit stuff). To my surprise it was so easy to learn, write and more importantly test. Only recent thing i have not learned is generics, hopefully will get their sooner. Coming from java background the things Go did felt so clever and just too good to believe
> Go stands by its compatibility promise—the old way will continue to work in perpetuity ...
It is so weird that they still claim this after they have made the the semantic change for 3-clause for-loop in Go 1.22.
When a Go module is upgraded from 1.21- to 1.22+, there are some potential breaking cases which are hard to detect in time. https://go101.org/blog/2024-03-01-for-loop-semantic-changes-...
Go toolchain 1.22 broke compatibility for sure. Even the core team admit it. https://go101.org/bugs/go-build-directive-not-work.html
It's especially funny considering that this issue has been known from lisps for 50+ years..
Love Go! It gently introduced me to the systems programming world.
I'm thankful for Go because it was an easy first introduction to static typing.
I remember making a little web app and seeing the type errors pop up magically in all he right places where I missed things in my structs. It was a life-changing experience.
I am not really familiar with Go but I wonder where it would be without Google's support and maintenance. I have no doubt it is a solid language with some really smart people in programming language design behind it. It is so much easy to release programming language but so much difficult to maintain and curate it over time.
Golang to me is a great runtime and very poor language. I could maybe get used to the C pointer-like syntax and to half of my code checking if err != nil, but the lack of classes is a step too far. The Golang idiomatic approach is to have a sprawling set of microservices talking to each other over the network, to manage complexity instead of having classes. This makes sense for things like systems agents (eg K8) but doesn't make sense for most applications because it complicates the development experience unnecessarily and monoliths are also easier to debug.
I would not use Golang for a big codebase with lots of business logic. Golang has not made a dent in Java usage at big companies, no large company is going to try replacing their Java codebases with Golang because there's no benefit, Java is almost as fast as Golang and has classes and actually has a richer set of concurrency primitives.
Microservices are entirely unrelated to classes and in no way endemic to go.
Go’s lack of inheritance is one of its bolder decisions and I think has been proven entirely correct in use.
Instead of the incidental complexity encouraged by pointless inheritance hierarchies we go back to structure which bundle data and behaviour and can compose them instead.
Favouring composition over inheritance is not a new idea nor did it come from the authors of Go.
Also the author of Java (Gosling) disagrees with you.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/2160788/why-extends-is-evi...
I think lack of classes is highly desirable. So much enterprise code is poorly put together abstractions.
I think go needs some more functional aspects, like iterators and result type/pattern matching.
The solution to bad abstractions it not to make it very difficult to create abstractions at all. For systems code I think it's fine but for application code you probably want some abstractions or else it's very hard to scale a codebase.
Go does have iterators: https://pkg.go.dev/iter
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Been happily working in Go since 2014. My career has spanned C, Python, C#, Ruby, and a smattering of other languages, but am always quite fond and preferential towards Go.
Every Go thread on this site is the same.
"Man I love Go, it's so simple, plenty fast, really easy to pick up, read, and write. I really love that it doesn't have dozens of esoteric features for my colleagues to big brain into the codebase"
"Oh yeah? Well Go sucks, it doesn't have dozens of esoteric features for me to big brain into the codebase"
Repeat
I remember when Go was born, then, it turned out there was already another programming language called "Go!", but nobody cared, and everybody forgot about that other Go!. So, happy birthday, Go, and rest in peace, Go!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)#Con...
I tough that would be about SWEET16
Oh wow, so it's already been 16 years since Google steamrolled the Go! language, which had existed a decade before Go and had every right to the name. This was when they were still pretending "do no evil" was their brand.
There may be no honor amongst thieves but there is honor amongst langdevs, and when they did Go! dirty, Google made clear which one they are.
Status changed to Unfortunate
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/9#issuecomment-66047478
Go! was clearly a toy language created only for the purpose of writing papers. It has no applications outside academia. Meanwhile Google's golang exists mostly in the sphere of practical use.
Does anyone use that other language? No!
Go! wasn't even published as its own project [1] until 2015, well after Go(lang) was available. It previously existed as an unpublished CVS repository in an obscure Sourceforge project [2]; I can't fault the Go developers for ignoring or overlooking it. You can find a circa-2002 version of Go! in the archived CVS repository of the Sourceforge project, but none of the project's release files appear to contain it.
(Ignore the "Last Update: 2013-09-06" on the project page - that's the date that SourceForge performed an automatic migration. Any real activity on the project seems to have petered out around 2002, with one final file released in 2003.)
[1]: https://github.com/fgmccabe/go
[2]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/networkagent/
That's not the point, no one uses 99% of languages, so if that's the standard then it's a free-for-all. The PL community is small, so norms are important.
PL naming code is:
1. Whoever uses the name first, has claim to the name. Using the name first is measured by: when was the spec published, or when is the first repo commit.
2. A name can be reused IFF the author has abandoned the original project. Usually there's a grace period depending on how long the project was under development. But if a project is abandoned then there's nothing to stop someone from picking up the name.
3. Under no circumstances should a PL dev step on the name of a currently active PL project. If that happens, it's up to the most recently named project to change their name, not the older project even if the newer project has money behind it.
4. Language names with historical notoriety are essentially "retired" despite not being actively developed anymore.
All of this is reasonable, because the PL namespace is still largely unsaturated*. There are plenty of one syllable English words that are out there for grabs. All sorts of animals, verbs, nouns, and human names that are common for PLs are there for the taking. There's no reason to step on someone else's work just because there's some tie in with your company's branding.
So it's pretty bottom basement behavior for luminaries like Ken Thompson and Rob Pike to cosign Google throwing around their weight to step on another dev's work, and then say essentially "make me" when asked to stop.
* This of course does not apply to the single-letter langs, but even still, that namespace doesn't really have 25 langs under active development.
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I just can’t get over the idiotic syntax.
Instead of “int x”
You have “var x int”
Which obscures the type, making it harder to read the code. The only justification is that 16 years ago, some guy thought he was being clever. For 99.99% of code, it’s a worse syntax. Nobody does eight levels of pointer redirection in typical everyday code.
I prefer this, especially for more complex types like functions- https://go.dev/blog/declaration-syntax gives an overview of their thought process
"x: int p: pointer to int a: array[3] of int These declarations are clear, if verbose - you just read them left to right. Go takes its cue from here, but in the interests of brevity it drops the colon and removes some of the keywords "
And in the process makes it significantly harder for human eyes to find the boundary between identifier and type.
16 years is a bit of an under-estimate. I think the first popular language with this form of declaration was Pascal.
Go was developed by many of the minds behind C, and inertia would have led them to C-style declaration. I don't know if they've ever told anybody why they went with the Pascal style, but I would bet money on the fact that Pascal-style declarations are simply easier and faster for computers to parse. And it doesn't just help with compile speed, it also makes syntax highlighting far more reliable and speeds up tooling.
Sure, it's initially kind of annoying if you're used to the C style of type before identifier, but it's something you can quickly get to grips with. And as time has gone on, it seems like a style that a lot of modern languages have adopted. Off the top of my head, I think this style is in TypeScript, Python type hints, Go, Rust, Nim, Zig, and Odin. I asked Claude for a few more examples and apparently it's also used by Kotlin, Swift, and various flavors of ML and Haskell.
But hey, if you're still a fan of type before variable, PHP has your back.
I have no problem with ident: type. I have problem with dropping the colon between them for no good reason, even though there used to be 2 quite well-established patterns every language adhered to.
> don't know if they've ever told anybody why they went with the Pascal style
I don’t know if this is the reason but Robert Griesemer, one of the three original guys, comes from a Pascal/Modula background.
Golang exists in this weird place where it's similar enough to C so that intuition connects it with C, but at the same time different enough that you keep tripping over.
how would that look with type inference?
You can write
var x = 5
how would that work if the type had to be first? Languages that added inference later tend to have “auto” as the type which looks terrible.
And still so many programming language design history lessons to learn from.
Maybe by 18, or 21, the maturity finally settles in.