Comment by bobbyrullo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobbyrullo | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, there's lots of trade-offs - you can't build anything significant without trade-offs. Also, you can still say performance is a value and trade it away for other things, eg GC. It's a bit silly to say that if something isn't as fast as C++/C right away then it doesn't take performance seriously. I don't think anyone's being dishonest in making such trade-offs - if you have multiple competing values then you need them.

The big difference with stuff like GC and re-writing stuff in go slowing the compiler time is that they are not inherent to the language. That stuff can and will improve. With generics if done incorrectly, it's more or less permanent. So I appreciate the conservatism there, and don't think it's fair (or accurate) to say that it's dishonest.

> The big difference with stuff like GC and re-writing stuff in go slowing the compiler time is that they are not inherent to the language.

Actually, I think GC is inherent to the language, and that's why I listed it as one of the trade-offs that Go made (not the Go implementation made). Almost every language construct depends on GC, e.g. append(), make(), and more. Even the following innocent-looking code:

  func f() *int {
    a := 1
    return &a
  }

is GC-dependent, because it would result in a dangling pointer in non-GC languages. But the code is perfectly fine in Go because GC is inherent to the language. It is not possible to make GC optional in Go, so the performance penalty will stay there forever, only alleviated as the implementation matures (or sometimes regressed, as Go 1.5 shows), unless you use only unsafe.Pointer all the time.

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