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Go is still not good

(blog.habets.se)
644 points ustad | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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blixt ◴[] 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 ◴[] 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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porridgeraisin ◴[] No.44983543[source]
> std-lib

Yes, My favourite is the `time` package. It's just so elegant how it's just a number under there, the nominal type system truly shines. And using it is a treat. What do you mean I can do `+= 8*time.Hour` :D

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candiddevmike ◴[] No.44983656[source]
The way Go parses time strings by default is insane though, even the maintainers regret it. It's a textbook example of being too clever.
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nkozyra ◴[] No.44985420[source]
By choosing default values instead of templatized values?

Other than having to periodically remember what 0-padded milliseconds are or whatever this isn't a huge deal.

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mdaniel ◴[] No.44985857[source]
I'm not OP, but I also got tripped up the first time I saw time.Parse("2006-01-02 03:04:05") and was like what the actual?!

https://pkg.go.dev/time#Layout

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1. peterashford ◴[] No.45002829[source]
Yeah, that's ugly as fuck. I hate it