Comment by simonw
5 hours ago
I have certainly become Go-curious thanks to coding agents - I have a medium sized side-project in progress using Go at the moment and it's been surprisingly smooth sailing considering I hardly know the language.
The Go standard library is a particularly good fit for building network services and web proxies, which fits this project perfectly.
It's funny seeing you say that, because I've had an entire arc of despising the design of, and peremptorily refusing to use, Go, to really enjoying it, thanks to AI coding agents being able to take care of the boilerplate for me.
It turns out that verbosity isn't really a problem when LLMs are the one writing the code based on more high level markdown specs (describing logic, architecture, algorithms, concurrency, etc), and Go's extreme simplicity, small range of language constructs, and explicitness (especially in error handling and control flow) make it much easier to quickly and accurately review agent code.
It also means that Go's incredible (IMO) runtime, toolchain, and standard library are no longer marred by the boilerplate either, and I can begin to really appreciate their brilliance. It has me really reconsidering a lot of what I believed about language design.
Yeah, I much prefer Go to Rust for LLM things because I find Go code easy to read and understand despite having little experience with it - Rust syntax still trips me up.
Not to mention that, in general, there's a lot more to keep in mind with Rust.
I've written probably tens of thousands of lines of Rust at this point, and while I used to absolutely adore it, I've really completely fallen out of love with it, and part of it is that it's not just the syntax that's horrible to look at (which I only realized after spending some time with Go and Python), but you have to always keep in mind a lot of things:
- the borrow checker - lifetimes, - all the different kinds of types that represent different ways of doing memory management - parse out sometimes extremely complex and nearly point-free iterator chaining - deal with a complex type system that can become very unwieldy if you're not careful - and more I'm probably not thinking of right now
Not to mention the way the standard library exposes you to the full bore of all the platform-specific complexities it's designed on top of, and forces you to deal with them, instead of exposing a best-effort POSIX-like unified interface, so path and file handling can be hellish. (this is basically the reverse of fasterthanlime's point in the famous "I want off mr. golang's wild ride" essay).
It's just a lot more cognitive overhead to just getting something done if all you want is a fast statically compiled, modern programming language. And it makes it even harder to review code. People complain about Go boilerplate, but really, IME, Rust boilerplate is far, far worse.
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100% check out Golang even more! I have been writing Golang AI coding projects for a really long time because I really loved writing different languages and Golang was one in which I settled on.
Golang's libraries are phenomenal & the idea of porting over to multiple servers is pretty easy, its really portable.
I actually find Golang good for CLI projects, Web projects and just about everything.
Usually the only time I still use python uvx or vibe code using that is probably when I am either manipulating images or pdf's or building a really minimalist tkinkter UI in python/uv
Although I tried to convert the python to golang code which ended up using fyne for gui projects and surprisingly was super robust but I might still use python in some niche use cases.
Check out my other comment in here for finding a vibe coded project written in a single prompt when gemini 3 pro was launched in the web (I hope its not promotion because its open source/0 telemetry because I didn't ask for any of it to be added haha!)
Golang is love. Golang is life.
> considering I hardly know the language.
Same boat! In fact I used to (still do) dislike Go's syntax and error handling (the same 4 lines repeated every time you call a function), but given that LLMs can write the code and do the cross-model review for me, I literally don't even see the Go source code, which is nice because I'd hate it if I did (my dislike of Go's syntax + all the AI slop in the code would drive me nuts).
But at the end of the day, Go has good scaffolding, the best tooling (maybe on par with Rust's, definitely better than Python even with uv), and tons of training data for LLMs. It's also a rather simple language, unlike Swift (which I wish was simpler because it's a really nice language otherwise).