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Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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blixt ◴[] No.44983245[source]
I've been using Go more or less in every full-time job I've had since pre-1.0. It's simple for people on the team to pick up the basics, it generally chugs along (I'm rarely worried about updating to latest version of Go), it has most useful things built in, it compiles fast. Concurrency is tricky but if you spend some time with it, it's nice to express data flow in Go. The type system is most of the time very convenient, if sometimes a bit verbose. Just all-around a trusty tool in the belt.

But I can't help but agree with a lot of points in this article. Go was designed by some old-school folks that maybe stuck a bit too hard to their principles, losing sight of the practical conveniences. That said, it's a _feeling_ I have, and maybe Go would be much worse if it had solved all these quirks. To be fair, I see more leniency in fixing quirks in the last few years, like at some point I didn't think we'd ever see generics, or custom iterators, etc.

The points about RAM and portability seem mostly like personal grievances though. If it was better, that would be nice, of course. But the GC in Go is very unlikely to cause issues in most programs even at very large scale, and it's not that hard to debug. And Go runs on most platforms anyone could ever wish to ship their software on.

But yeah the whole error / nil situation still bothers me. I find myself wishing for Result[Ok, Err] and Optional[T] quite often.

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guappa ◴[] No.44983384[source]
> The type system is most of the time very convenient

In what universe?

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1. theshrike79 ◴[] No.44983456[source]
In mine. It's Just Fine.

Is it the best or most robust or can you do fancy shit with it? No

But it works well enough to release reliable software along with the massive linter framework that's built on top of Go.

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2. diarrhea ◴[] No.44987748[source]
> massive linter framework

I wonder why that ended up being necessary... ;)

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3. theshrike79 ◴[] No.44996643[source]
All languages have linters, Go just has a proper ecosystem of them due to the way the language is built.
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4. diarrhea ◴[] No.44997809{3}[source]

    $ golangci-lint linters | wc -l
         107
That is a long list of linters (only a few enabled by default however). I much prefer less fragmented approaches such as clippy or ruff. It makes for a more coherent experience and surely much higher performance (1x AST parsing instead of dozens of times).