Problems with Go channels (2016)

I've been using Go since 2011. One year less than the author. Channels are bad. No prioritization. No combining with other synchronisation primitives without extra goroutines. In Go, no way to select on a variable number of channels (without more goroutines). The poor type system doesn't let you improve abstractions. Basically anywhere I see a channel in most people's code particular in the public interface, I know it's going to be buggy. And I've seen so many bugs. Lots of abandoned projects are because they started with channels and never dug themselves out.

The lure to use channels is too strong for new users.

The nil and various strange shapes of channel methods aren't really a problem they're just hard for newbs.

Channels in Go should really only be used for signalling, and only if you intend to use a select. They can also act as reducers, fan out in certain cases. Very often in those cases you have a very specific buffer size, and you're still only using them to avoid adding extra goroutines and reverting to pure signalling.

This is almost completely down to Go's type terrible system and is more proof that Google should have improved SML/CML (StandardML/ConcurrentML) implementations/libraries rather than create a new language. They'd have a simpler and more powerful language without all the weirdness they've added on (eg, generics being elegant and simple rather than a tacked-on abomination of syntax that Go has).

Go user for ten years and I don’t know what happened, but this year I hit some internal threshold with the garbage type system, tedious data structures, and incessant error checking being 38% of the LoC. I’m hesitant to even admit what language I’m considering a full pivot to.

Raku? Unison? Qi? Don't tell me it's something boring like C# ;)

Caught me, C#. Library quality has improved a lot in ten years, the language feels modern, and one of Go's biggest advantages, single binary cross-compile, is way less relevant now that dotnet standard installs easily on every OS I care about. I was prototyping some code that needed to talk to OpenAI, Slack, and Linear and the result was.. fast and extremely readable inline async code. I've interacted with these APIs in Go as well and by comparison, ultra clunky.

We're a video game studio as well using C#, and while game programmer != backend programmer, I can at least delegate small fixes and enhancements out to the team more easily.