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Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 4 comments | 22 Aug 25 09:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.981s | source
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the_duke ◴[22 Aug 25 11:46 UTC] No.44983331[source]▶
I personally don't like Go, and it has many shortcomings, but there is a reason it is popular regardless:

Go is a reasonably performant language that makes it pretty straightforward to write reliable, highly concurrent services that don't rely on heavy multithreading - all thanks to the goroutine model.

There really was no other reasonably popular, static, compiled language around when Google came out.

And there still barely is - the only real competitor that sits in a similar space is Java with the new virtual threads.

Languages with async/await promise something similar, but in practice are burdened with a lot of complexity (avoiding blocking in async tasks, function colouring, ...)

I'm not counting Erlang here, because it is a very different type of language...

So I'd say Go is popular despite the myriad of shortcomings, thanks to goroutines and the Google project street cred.

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1. gf000 ◴[22 Aug 25 11:54 UTC] No.44983413[source]▶
> And there still barely is - the only real competitor that sits in a similar space is Java with the new virtual threads

Which Google uses far more commonly than Go, still to this day.

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2. nasretdinov ◴[22 Aug 25 15:18 UTC] No.44985672[source]▶
Well Google isn't really making a ton of new (successful) services these days, so the potential to introduce a new language is quite small unfortunately :). Plus, Go lacks one quite important thing which is ability to do an equivalent of HotSwap in the live service, which is really useful for debugging large complex applications without shutting them down.
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3. gf000 ◴[22 Aug 25 16:56 UTC] No.44986858[source]▶
Google is 100% writing a whole load of new services, and Go is 13 years old (even older within Google), so it surely has had ample opportunities to take.

As for hot swap, I haven't heard it being used for production, that's mostly for faster development cycles - though I could be wrong. Generally it is safer to bring up the new version, direct requests over, and shut down the old version. It's problematic to just hot swap classes, e.g. if you were to add a new field to one of your classes, how would old instances that lack it behave?

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4. nasretdinov ◴[22 Aug 25 18:30 UTC] No.44988005{3}[source]▶
HotSwap is really useful to be able to make small adjustments, e.g. to add a logging statement somewhere to test your hypothesis. It's probably not safe to use to change the behaviour significantly, certainly not in production :)