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Comment by throwawaysbdi | Hacker News Reader

Yes! Go has a really small runtime I think a lot of us can't wait till Go is usable in browser.

Every developer I know hates JavaScript. I think the only ones that like it are honestly people that haven't used much else. Literally everything about the language including tooling and module systems around it is a garbage fire.

I tried to use Node and it gives stupid shitty error messages all the time and blows up if anything hangs for 200ms because it only supports a single thread. It's honestly pretty crap compared to more mature runtimes in C#, Java, Go, Python etc...

I think what's happened is that a bunch of front end HTML guys that only use JS have been introduced to fire water and they're going nuts about it

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Go has a small runtime? It says here [1] that "hello world" in Go 1.7 is about a megabyte. That's huge by web standards. Even if they cut it in half.

GopherJS apparently struggles with binary size too [2] (though that's not WebAssembly).

[1] https://blog.golang.org/go1.7-binary-size [2] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/issues/136

I think its fair to point out that:

  1. without concurrency
  2. if GC end up being provided by the execution environment
  3. without the need to support networking and file-system (assuming this has to go through JS)

The go runtime for WASM could potentially be much smaller than the size of the standard server side runtime.

I forgot to note, if lots of page use this runtime and its loaded as a separate cacheable asset with a long TTL, the chances of it being cache are pretty great. Go didn't get popular for FE and I was writing a webapp FE in it I might stick it local storage too...

You're in a bubble. I've used QBASIC, C, C++, various .NET languages, Java, Python, list goes on and on. I've led desktop app, firmware drivers, kernel driver, security architecture projects, list goes on and on.

And guess what? I've been doing a ton of web dev over the past 5 or so years and I love it. I use React/Webpack/Node/ES201x/Typescript/etc. It's great.

When you're in a bubble, you like things for the beast you know, and hate things for the beast you don't know. There are a ton of devs out there that do not hate JS, and it sure as hell isn't out of inexperience.

EDIT: I just realized you were replying to the over zealous fellow that replied to me and not me. Sorry. Time for coffee.

>You're in a bubble.

Come on, I made a qualified statement, I didn't even say most devs.

> I've used QBASIC, C, C++, various .NET languages, Java, Python, list goes on and on. I've led desktop app, firmware drivers, kernel driver, security architecture projects, list goes on and on.

I have a fairly similar history, ASM, QBASIC, C/C++, Java, Go, .NET (C#/VB), Haskell, Scheme, Prolog etc. I have also worked on systems software and applications.

I've worked at consulting firms, fortune 500s and startups and I have to say if you haven't run into my sentiment before commonly, I would assert that it is you who are in the bubble (sorry). I don't think you have to agree with my opinion, but to reject it as being common is absurd.

I don't hate JS out of lack of familiarity, in fact I have spent a lot of time porting node apps to Go and discovering all their terrifying callback spaghetti, concurrency bottle necks and inconsistent typing during single variable lifetime.

I have used many languages, including Python, and I like JavaScript. It depend of lot of what you want to do with the language. If all the programmers you know are doing the same sort of tasks, such as server side scripts (the goal of Go), they have no reason to like JS.

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