Comment by gf000
6 hours ago
Most of these reasons apply to Java as much, if not more.
It's an even more popular language with even more training data and also has a better type system so more validation on LLM output, etc.
6 hours ago
Most of these reasons apply to Java as much, if not more.
It's an even more popular language with even more training data and also has a better type system so more validation on LLM output, etc.
Java has decade(s) of cruft and breaking changes which LLMs were trained on. It's hard to compare. Plus Go compilation speed/test running provides quick iteration for LLMs.
All you need is a JAVA_CODING_GUIDELINES.md with some hints about what kind of Java code you like the agent to write.
breaking changes? hardly.
Yes, breaking changes. And many ways to do the same thing because the language kept evolving (thankfully).
There is a decently long list of breaking changes now. Removing JavaEE modules from the JDK, and restricting sun.misc.Unsafe, are the ones people usually run into.
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Exactly, the propping up of Go seems unfounded. Java in it's newest iterations make it more compelling as a target, and people, especially young people, overlook it because of its stigma as enterprise cruft.
Certainly not the "one way to write it" idea. Java has a ton of language features.
Not really. It has a pretty bare bones OOP (single inheritance, interface), primitives and objects, generics and pretty much that's it.
Newer features fit very nicely and didn't increase the language surface (records are just a normal class with some methods auto-generated, while sealed types are just a restriction on who can subtype an interface -- and yet these give full ADT support for the language that improves readability and type safety).
Annotations add a seemingly infinite amount of new semantics. You can’t predict anything with confidence just looking at the code without also studying the annotation processors in depth, which regular Java tools don’t help you with.
I mostly write Go code (and have barely had to write any code myself in the past months), but today I had to do some work in a Java project and Claude Code was a terrible experience.
It really felt like using AI tooling of a year or two ago. It wasn’t understanding my prompts, going on tangents, not following the existing style and idioms. Maybe Claude was hungover or doesn’t like mondays, but the contrast with Go was surprising.
One example is that I wanted to add an extra prometheus metric to keep track of an edge case in some for loop. All it had to do was define a counter and increment it. For some reason it would define the counter the line before increment it, instead of defining it next to the other counters outside of the for loop. Technically not wrong (defining a counter is idempotent), but who does that? Especially when the other counters are defined elsewhere in the same function?
Anyway, n=1 but I feel it has an easier time with Go.
Well, there was a Claude outage today, maybe related :D
My n=1 is that it is pretty good with Java, on par with other popular languages like Python and JS, in line with these 3 probably being a good chunk if not the majority of training data.
How are JVM startup times nowadays? Frankly the need to ship with a JVM (modulo graal admittedly) is a drawback, eg for CLI tools - which the author listed as a requirement. Go's static executable story, combined with it's competitive performance - without C++ or rust contortions - is a strong combo when your focus is on startup time and deployment simplicity. (If, otoh, I cared a lot about GC I'd definitely prefer Java - eg for non-fast algo trading.)
Java is a fine language, tech stack, and ecosystem, but I agree with the author and parent commenter that this is a sweet spot for Go. Their decision to use it makes a lot of sense.
I wonder what people will say to that.
I personally think neither Go nor Java would be good for "agents". Better to have them sandboxed in WASM.
Sandboxing is a completely orthogonal issue and WASM is probably not a good direct target for LLMs.
Of course writing a language that compiles to Wasm is certainly a way, but you would have to sandbox also all the other tools that is used during development (e.g. agents can just call grep/find/etc).
WASM isn't a language you'd want to program with. you can't verify outputs nor is there any proper training data aside from examples and such
Except that Go is a simpler, smaller language than Java. That's one of the key points in the post.
More simplistic, not really simpler.