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Comment by pbohun | Hacker News Reader

The most important thing is to use the right tool for the right job. If the project has networking and doesn't involve building a GUI or graphics, then Go is a great choice. (Not that Go can't do GUIs or graphics, but there aren't very robust and mature libraries for those things yet).

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Java's networking capabilities are rock solid, battle-tested and have got very fast as it is used in many heavy duty back end systems all over the world

With network applications, you're often trying to optimize performance. It seems to me that the Go GC would make it a non optimal choice for network applications. I think writing it in Go would be good for the prototype.

Go is great for I/O bound applications.

Does Go do networking better than Java?

Go's standard library is pretty nice.

I know that Java's standard library is very complete. I know very little about Go's, but I presume that it's not more complete than Java's. Is Go's library easier to use than Java's? Is it significantly easier?

Go is through it's integrated support goroutines (green-threads) very efficient at IO, while still presenting it in a traditional fashion (like blocking IO).

Java can also be very efficient, but only provides the lower level NIO library out of the box. To use that you either have to build und understand a lot of components for yourself (e.g. an IO Reactor, timer handling, etc.) or include one of the bigger frameworks for this purpose (e.g. Netty).

If I did any UI pieces it would probably be in React talking back to an API handled by the core server.

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