I'm curious as to what makes you think that Java is preferable to Go for a large webapp that "spends most of its time talking to databases or message queues".
I would have thought that the Go's concurrency model would give it an edge.
I would have thought that the Go's concurrency model would give it an edge.
because your large webapp is made by a large team, over a large time span. The same as you don't deploy on power8 but on x86, because x86 is more common than power8 and cheaper.
One of your java programmers leave ? replace him is easy Need to find java programmers ready to do shitty and boring debugging ? easy Your large webapp is in maintenance mode and nobody internally wants to touch it, so you decide to find a cheap company abroad to outsource the maintenance ? easy
Hard to find these three with Go (or rust, and I love both) because right now it's taught in no large scale university nor a lot of people have been exposed "accidentaly" by it. SO if you have been exposed to Go (or rust) and decide to stik with it it's because you actively decide to, not just because of market force. Hence so you don't belongs to those who will want to do shitty bug fixing 8 hours ago, nor to the price of a developer people hire just to have two more hands, nor the kind who will accept a job under-payed for a outsourcing company.
Java, permits your management to feel they can scale the development
I certainly agree this is a big plus for Java.
here I was playing the devil's advocate, but to have been at both seat (having hard time to hire as a CTO and needing to fallback on PHP in one company / trying to push Rust in my current one) I now see why chosing a stack is not only about tehcnical merits.
Hopefully we aim to not work on such shitty apps. And in such a case, the overhead of learning a new language is dwarfed by the overhead of learning the domain-specific stuff.
And Rust, like any good language seems to have a, coherent(?), or elegant design. Stuff makes sense. As compared to some languages where things are just thrown in willy-nilly. This makes Rust easier to learn, as you can somewhat reason about how things must work.
for the record, i ran to python.
I only started using Go in the last couple of years, so I don't know how different it is now from when you tried it last, but I bet you would be pleasantly surprised if you gave it another look.
The only difference is lack of special syntax and being harder to use for basic blog post examples.
Usually people that compare parallel programming in C++, Java or .NET vs Go, never went beyond the basic thread features.