Go is still not good

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.

> Just all-around a trusty tool in the belt

I agree.

The Go std-lib is fantastic.

Also no dependency-hell with Go, unlike with Python. Just ship an oven-ready binary.

And what's the alternative ?

Java ? Licensing sagas requiring the use of divergent forks. Plus Go is easier to work with, perhaps especially for server-side deployments.

Zig ? Rust ? Complex learning curve. And having to choose e.g. Rust crates re-introduces dependency hell and the potential for supply-chain attacks.

> Java ? Licensing sagas requiring the use of divergent forks. Plus Go is easier to work with, perhaps especially for server-side deployments

Yeah, these are sagas only, because there is basically one, single, completely free implementation anyone uses on the server-side and it's OpenJDK, which was made 100% open-source and the reference implementation by Oracle. Basically all of Corretto, AdoptOpenJDK, etc are just builds of the exact same repository.

People bringing this whole license topic up can't be taken seriously, it's like saying that Linux is proprietary because you can pay for support at Red Hat..

There are other JVMs that do not descend from OpenJDK, but in general your point stands.