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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

You are probably referring to the sentence "Rust is quickly becoming my favorite language for all systems work (which is most of what I do anyway), and has largely replaced both Go, Python, and C/C++ in my day-to-day."

One could also interpret is as "Rust is quickly becoming my favorite language for all systems work [...], and has __also__ largely replaced both Go, Python, and C/C++ in my day-to-day."

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That is indeed how I meant it. That said, Go is certainly being used as a systems language, and especially in the domain of networked services, it is rapidly replacing C/C++.

replacing python is a bit of stretch no? I'm sure you can, but is it practical? like for quickly hacking stuff up.

Actually, no. I've found that I'm maybe even more productive in Rust than I am in Python, even for one-off tasks. The one exception is probably plotting, but I'm sure a Rust library for that isn't far off.

Impressive, I'll have to check it out :)

What's your replacement for Python REPLs like bpython or ptpython?

I barely, if ever, use/need a REPL. The shell has all the tools I need for short, one-off tasks.

Once upon a time I used Python for systems administration tasks and that was a long time ago, around 2003.

Python doesn't offer much against languages that compile to native code, have type inference (if strong typed) and REPL.

The only reason for me, would be if I am required to make use of a framework or library that requires me to use Python.

I find getting stuff up and running with Go is quite easy. Just set up a small package with some quick hacks and then a separate file to run the package functions.

I use Scala for that kind of use case sometimes. If you have a REPL and you have good enough type inference you can pretty much just do what you would do in Python, and as a bonus you can reuse library functions from your real system rather than having to duplicate or shell out to them from your scripts

"and especially in the domain of networked services, it is rapidly replacing C/C++."

Rapidly? Where?

I don't have any numbers to support this claim, but it's certainly true that we are seeing a lot of software being developed in Go, and network software in particular.

Examples of services that typically would have been written in C/C++ but are written in Go: Docker, YouTube Vitess (a MySQL proxy), CockroachDB (a distributed and strongly consistent SQL database).

Other examples of companies using Go for network services: Dropbox (most backend), CloudFlare (Railgun and other things), Uber (geofencing), Bitly (messaging with NSQ), Disqus (realtime commenting), DigitalOcean, Heroku, SoundCloud, Dailymotion.

Thanks to the adoption of Docker, Dropbox and other well known SV companies.

Even Microsoft is now contributing to the eco-system due to their collaboration with Docker. Also Joe Duffy (from MSR Midori) tweets about his Go experiences.

Personally I prefer other languages, but I am surely happy to see more Go and less unsafe languages being used.

Go also has the advantage of a simple syntax like Python. Moving some of our ETL processes to Go from Python has been quite easy.

There is also Netflix using it for a proxy:

> The decision to use Go was deliberate, because we needed something that had lower latency than Java (where garbage collection pauses are an issue) and is more productive for developers than C, while also handling tens of thousands of client connections. Go fits this space well.

Source: http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/05/application-data-caching...

Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/4l0fv2/the_netflix_...

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