Pitch me on Go

Part of a new series! Feel welcome to dip in and weigh in on a past question.

Let's say I've never used Golang before. Can anyone give the run down of what the language does and why you prefer it? Feel free to touch on drawbacks as well.

Comments

[Mahmoud Harmouch]

In brief, GO is a blazingly fast, statically typed programming language that outperforms so many damn dynamically typed languages.

FYI: There is a go version of docker-compose called compose v2. Worth a try. You will never regret that.

[Anon]

Super fast pr reviews because there are very few choices to make. I don't love go, but that seems like it's strongest selling point relative to scala. It kind of reminds me of the goals of "basic English".

[Vicente G. Reyes]

What's the basis for learning Go in a day?

[Manuel Odendahl]

I like pointing people who already know programming to "Effective Go". If you have no experience with concurrency and threading, that will take some additional learning. Don't go in there just YOLOing channels and goroutines left and right.

My rules for goroutines:

• know when, where and why a goroutine is created
• for every goroutine, make sure it can properly be cancelled
• for every goroutine, think and design how it would report errors
• for every goroutine, know exactly when it finishes, and how its results are handled
• use errgroup to start goroutines, and write actual goroutine bodies as Run(ctx *context.Context, args...) error

[Anon]

Coming from scala, clojure, elixir viewpoint, the golang ecosystem is huge and many vendors provide bindings. From a python, node view, golang feels a little smaller.

[the_aceix]

Man, u've bee sleeping in dough; niche background

[Manuel Odendahl]

Pros:

• get shit done
• very readable
• lots of nice libraries
• all libraries that do async work are easily integratable
• easy cross compilation + static binaries
• opinionated toolchain
• easy to integrate code generation
• go mod + workspaces finally make it nice
• faster than most things out there, good enough for serious embedded work

Cons:

• kind of user hostile (terse tool output)
• dependency management was a shitshow for a long time (kind of solved)
• people gloss over the fact that you can easily make big big concurrency booboo if you don't know what you are doing
• very verbose (github copilot helps a lot)

[Karan Pratap Singh]

It's very productive language with very powerful concurrency. I also released my course on it recently!

Learn Go: The complete course

Karan Pratap Singh ・ May 4 ・ 72 min read

#go #tutorial #beginners

[peerreynders]

• sorta functional but lacking

First time I've seen that as a euphemism for procedural.

Go FAQ: Why build concurrency on the ideas of CSP?:
"Experience with several earlier languages has shown that the CSP model fits well into a procedural language framework.".

It's a procedural language with a built in coordination model (for something functional you have go with something like Erlang or Elixir).

[Daniel Schulz]

Just look at the mascot.

[peerreynders]

It is a very simple language

"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical."

Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering

In Rich Hickey's terms it tends more towards easy (familiar) rather than simple.