←back to thread

Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.408s | source
Show context
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.

replies(18): >>44983384 #>>44983427 #>>44983465 #>>44983479 #>>44983531 #>>44983616 #>>44983802 #>>44983872 #>>44984433 #>>44985251 #>>44985721 #>>44985839 #>>44986166 #>>44987302 #>>44987396 #>>45002271 #>>45002492 #>>45018751 #
1. theshrike79 ◴[] No.44983479[source]
People tend to refer to the bit where Discord rewrote a bit of their stack in Rust because Go GC pauses were causing issues.

The code was on the hot path of their central routing server handling Billions (with a B) messages in a second or something crazy like that.

You're not building Discord, the GC will most likely never be even a blip in your metrics. The GC is just fine.

replies(1): >>44986334 #
2. AtlasBarfed ◴[] No.44986334[source]
I get you can specifically write code that does not malloc, but I'm curious at scale if there are heap management / fragmentation and compression issues that are equivalent to GC pause issues.

I don't have a lot of experience with the malloc languages at scale, but I do know that heat fragmentation and GC fragmentation are very similar problems.

There are techniques in GC languages to avoid GC like arena allocation and stuff like that, generally considered non-idiomatic.