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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: 0.373s | source
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the_duke ◴[22 Aug 25 11:46 UTC] 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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cogman10 ◴[22 Aug 25 12:02 UTC] No.44983469[source]▶
Slowly but surely, the jvm has been closing the go gap. With efforts like virtual threads, zgc, lilliput, Leyden, and Valhalla, the jvm has been closing the gap.

The change from Java 8 to 25 is night and day. And the future looks bright. Java is slowly bringing in more language features that make it quite ergonomic to work with.

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theshrike79 ◴[22 Aug 25 12:06 UTC] No.44983508[source]▶
I'm still traumatised by Java from my earlier career. So many weird patterns, FactoryFactories and Spring Framework and ORMs that work 90% of the time and the 10% is pure pain.

I have no desire to go back to Java no matter how much the language has evolved.

For me C# has filled the void of Java in enterprise/gaming environments.

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1. lisbbb ◴[23 Aug 25 02:55 UTC] No.44992670[source]▶
I spent untold hours and years mastering inversion of control and late-binding and all those design patterns that were SOOOOO important for interviews only to never really utilize all that stuff because once the apps were built, they rarely, if ever, got reconfigured to do something besides the exact thing they were built for. We might as well have not bothered with any of it and just wrote modular, testable non-OOP code and called it a day. After just about 25 years, I look back at all the time I spent using Spring Framework, Struts, and older products and just kind of shake my head. It was all someone else's money making scheme.

I'm also reminded about the time that Tomcat stopped being an application you deploy to and just being an embedded library in the runtime! It was like the collective light went on that Web containers were just a sham. That didn't prevent employers from forcing me to keep using Websphere/WAS because "they paid for that and by god they're going to use it!" Meanwhile it was totally obsolete as docker containers just swept them all by the wayside.

I wonder what "Webshere admins" are doing these days? That was once a lucrative role to be able to manage those Jython configs, lol.