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Comment by jondot | Hacker News Reader

There are so many motivations for this (and so many lisp/go projects that are abandoned). This looks very promising and I hope it takes off.

A few of the motivations:

* A lisp with an amazing startup time

* A lisp that can tap into a big and vivid ecosystem, like Clojure is tapping into Java's and its own

* Cross compilation and self-contained binary (I've personally tried doing this with various lisps, and none of them really support it)

* Go as a platform is improving version by version and is very performant already

Another way to think of it - if only Clojure compiled to binary directly, then this would be pointless. Because chances of that happening are virtually zero, is why this project made my day.

Go is the assembly language of cloud infrastructure, just as Javascript is becoming yet another "assembly" language. I believe Go is perfect for this, because it is also simple (as opposed to ES6, for example).

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"Go is the assembly language of cloud infrastructure"

People say this about JavaScript because to run code in a browser, it has to execute as JavaScript. As a result, there are lots of actual libraries or webapps that are written in other languages and compiled to JavaScript.

In contrast, you can do cloud computing in Java, C++, or various other languages. Go may have advantages, but compiling to Go would just be a choice.

In short, I really don't know what you meant or why you'd say it.

I don't think (s)he meant Assembly, but rather the language used to "assemble" an awful lot of the modern cloud infrastructure. If you use Docker or CloudFlare, which I would think covers a sizable portion of new projects, your code is passing through something written in Go.

Google did a pretty amazing job of walking back the "replacement for C" talk and positioning Go as the language for web/micro/cluster/distribution/cloud/interconnected services.

But maybe I misinterpreted and (s)he meant Assembly.

Go made choices that makes it a good language to be compiled to. Compilation-wise: it's incredibly fast and compiles to static machine binaries. Runtime-wise: it has great concurrency and communication primitives.

Interesting. What I've heard about Google Go is that the design choices make it very difficult to implement a repl in. So I would expect any other language that compiles to it to be subject to the same limitation, making it a rather poor fit for a Lisp... but maybe I'm missing something?

Javascript would be the assembly language of web i.e. what runs on your browser. Although that won't be true with the advent of Webassembly. Go is language of choice on cloud.

If you ask me following is the checklist it passes:

1. Low memory footprint/good GC

2. Concurrency (goroutines) builtin

3. Great dependency (package) management

4. Compiled/closer to bare metal

5. Fast compilation

If you check other languages against the list they lack at least one of the above. If you feel any other language is better suited please tell.

> Go is language of choice on cloud.

I don't think this makes any sense. Javascript is the assembly language of the web because it's the only choice for the web (or more specifically, the browser). At best, any other legitimate choice will just compile to JavaScript, which is why it's thusly named. Go has no such privileged position; it's not even clear what it would mean to be the "language of choice on the cloud." You can write cloud software in any language you want, provided that the language has libraries for networking. All of the features you list are great, but none of them are exclusive to Go, nor are they required for cloud computing.

I agree that that the statements cannot be analogues. But then I never implied it. My answer was only to counter the statement that JavaScript is the assembly language, in future WebAssembly will likely take that role. Then I continued on my intended answer of why Go is the preferred language.

> 3. Great dependency (package) management

Eh... Then why are people experimenting with vendoring?

> If you check other languages against the list they lack at least one of the above. If you feel any other language is better suited please tell.

Ocaml checks all of them. So does Haskell (with stack package manager), with only the low memory requirement being challengeable since many aren't used to optimizing lazy evaluation.

Both languages you suggest require more learning (both have origins in academia) and are less popular compared to Go in usage.

Regarding the package management comment. If it is an experiment let results get in. Some people consider vendoring bad yet others find some use in it. If vendoring happens like it or not it wont make dependency management bad as a whole.

>Cross compilation and self-contained binary

Did you try Chicken Scheme?

  $ echo "(print \"Hello, World"'!'"\")" > hello-world.scm
  $ csc hello-world.scm
  $ ./hello-world 
  Hello, World!
  $ du hello-world
  16	hello-world

I use chicken and it's awesome, but i dont think there's an easy way to generate windows and mac binaries from linux. go is really good for that.

I don't know about 'easy', but it just calls GCC in the end, so anything that can be made to work with GCC can be made to work with Chicken. Apparently building Windows binaries on Linux can be done with MinGW, though I've never tried: http://www.blogcompiler.com/2010/07/11/compile-for-windows-o...

so why not just use Go? less complexity - same benefits. you're basically saying it's somehow an advantage to program in s-expressions...

Have you ever talked to a Lisp enthusiast?

That's said, the project states more flexibility as a goal - specifically supporting generics. Between code generation and the cross-language compiler, writing generics (but generating non-generic Go code) should be somewhat easy to reason about.

Have you ever talked to one of the many people who write Lisp,scheme, or Clojure for real world applications and even get paid for it.

There are many advantages to writing real world applications in a lisp.

There are many reasons using sexp's can be better than just writing Go including but not limited to:

- structured editing of source code - macros (dry, dsl's, etc) - if your Go code uses interface{} everywhere you'll probably have more of an advantage using dynamic typing anyway.

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