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Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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the_duke ◴[] 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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theshrike79 ◴[] No.44983524[source]
The comparative strictness and simplicity of Go also makes it a good option for LLM-assisted programming.

Every single piece of Go 1.x code scraped from the internet and baked in to the models is still perfectly valid and compiles with the latest version.

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1. danenania ◴[] No.44987133[source]
Yep, and Go’s discouragement of abstraction and indirection are also good qualities for LLM coding.