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Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 09:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.003s | source
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blixt ◴[22 Aug 25 11:35 UTC] 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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traceroute66 ◴[22 Aug 25 12:01 UTC] No.44983465[source]▶
> 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.

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1. Luker88 ◴[22 Aug 25 18:55 UTC] No.44988378[source]▶
> Rust crates re-introduces [...] potential for supply-chain attacks.

I have absolutely no idea how go would solve this problem, and in fact I don't think it does at all.

> The Go std-lib is fantastic.

I have seen worse, but I would still not call it decent considering this is a fairly new language that could have done a lot more.

I am going to ignore the incredible amount of asinine and downright wrong stuff in many of the most popular libraries (even the basic ones maintained by google) since you are talking only about the stdlib.

On the top of my head I found inconsistent tagging management for structs (json defaults, omitzero vs omitempty), not even errors on tag typos, the reader/writer pattern that forces you to to write custom connectors between the two, bzip2 has a reader and no writer, the context linked list for K/V. Just look at the consistency of the interfaces in the "encoding" pkg and cry, the package `hash` should actually be `checksum`. Why does `strconv.Atoi`/ItoA still exist? Time.Add() vs Time.Sub()...

It chock full of inconsistencies. It forces me to look at the documentation every single time I don't use something for more than a couple of days. No, the autocomplete with the 2-line documentation does not include the potential pitfalls that are explained at the top of the package only.

And please don't get me started on the wrappers I had to write around stuff in the net library to make it a bit more consistent or just less plain wrong. net/url.Parse!!! I said don't make my start on this package! nil vs NoBody! ARGH!

None of this is stuff at the language level (of which there is plenty to say).

None of it is a dealbreaker per se, but it adds attrition and becomes death by a billion cuts.

I don't even trust any parser written in go anymore, I always try to come up with corner cases to check how it reacts, and I am often surprised by most of them.

Sure, there are worse languages and libraries. Still not something I would pick up in 2025 for a new project.