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.

> Rust crates re-introduces dependency hell and the potential for supply-chain attacks.

I’m only a casual user of both but how are rust crates meaningfully different from go’s dependency management?

Go has a big, high quality standard library with most of what one might need. Means you have to bring in and manage (and trust) far fewer third party dependencies, and you can work faster because you’re not spending a bunch of time figuring out what the crate of the week is for basic functionality.

Rust intentionally chooses to have a small standard library to avoid the "dead batteries" problem. But the Rust community also maintains lists of "blessed" crates to try and cope with the issue of having to trust third-party software components of unknown quality.

> Rust intentionally chooses to have a small standard library to avoid the "dead batteries" problem.

There is a difference between "small" and Rust's which is for all intents and purposes, non-existent.

I mean, in 2025, not having crypto in stdlib when every man and his dog is using crypto ? Or http when every man and his dog are calling REST APIs ?

As the other person who replied to you said. Go just allows you to hit the ground running and get on with it.

Having to navigate the world of crates, unofficially "blessed" or not is just a bit of a re-inventing the wheel scenario really....

P.S. The Go stdlib is also well maintained, so I don't really buy the specific "dead batteries" claim either.