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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

    Features
    - Built using Golang

More general commentary: For people actually using the software, is the implementation language really a feature?

EDIT: to be clear, I'm not attacking go as a language but rather the general trend of citing the implementation language as a feature when the audience is more than just "developers"

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For the end user? No. For the self-hoster making the decision on whether or not to pick this solution? Yes.

The same goes with "Easy Installation". The end user doesn't care if the install or easy or hard.

You have to consider the dependencies, resource requirements, and manageability of anything you host.

Or just containerize and don't think about that :)

Containers can be just as much of a pain in the ass to set up as anything else. I’ve had instances of much better experiences setting up software running out of container than in container.

A lousy Dockerfile or missing docker-compose.yml will do that. Just because someone took the time to lump together a container doesn't mean it's the right one or that it would be reasonably useful to someone seeking to take advantage of the containerized software.

With self-hosting the host is often the end-user.

It's. And really big one. I don't use Go, but I self host some services. You need to host few services to understand how important this feature really is.

I hosted owncloud, tiny-tiny-rss, seafile, and some others. It was a nightmare to install any of these, then I installed gitea. That was EASY, REALLY EASY. No need to install and configure php, python2/3 and compile some modules for it.

With gitea you could just launch binary and it works, that's all. And compiling it from sources was just one command.

People ask this every time someone releases something written in Golang advertised as such. ;)

As a non-Go programmer, with absolutely no inclinations to get into it in the near future, I will happily accept a fast, self-contained Go binary over many other stacks.

Self containing binary that runs anywhere is the pinnacle of deployment :)

That tells me I'm not going to have to install some command line tools, a couple scripting language or JVM runtimes (make sure it's the right version, which may not be the latest!), a new package manager or three, and a bunch of other crap to run the program. Probably it's a one-file or one-file-and-a-config affair.

Since I installed Gogs recently, I was actively looking for an answer to "is it written in Go?" first of all. I like how easy it is to just bind service to localhost:someport and add one line for reverse proxy to nginx/caddy/apache/whatever, instead of dealing with all those CGI/FastCGI/WSGI/paths/permisions/indexes/whatever. The second thing I look for is "does it require MySQL or can I just make it create its own SQLite database and stop nagging me about configuration?".

Btw, I have never wrote go besides playing around with web server tutorial recently.

If only someone can recommend me a chat service that is just as easy to configure as Gogs. Mattermost requires its own domain :(

You can easily set up Mattermost with a subdomain by using nginx or your proxy of choice, which is only a little extra work, and with LE, can also be easily secured. This is what I did for Mattermost at my previous job, and it worked quite well.

As an ops engineer - yes, very much so. I hardly ever have problems with applications written in go, but there’s no way in hell you’ll see me installing something written in nodejs, mono or php.

When your an open source project, your marketing page also becomes a marketing page for more developers. With the word 'libre' in the app name, I think there is some of that kind of marketing going on ;)

I think libre here is a book pun

The poster is saying that it’s written in go so that if an HN reader is interesting hacking or contributing to it, they know this.

It could be modern tribal signaling

It could be signaling that I have a single binary to just install likely with no other dependencies, which is what I think when I see that statement

Then why not just say "single binary, no dependencies," rather than bury it under an additional layer of abstraction? A humblebrag is still bragging...

Because saying it was built with go says "single binary, no dependencies" and more. It also says that it was built in go for any developers who want to contribute.

If you know Go, which many don't/won't/can't.

I've never seen a language so obnoxiously namedropped as Go, it's really annoying. We have such a hard-on for our tools, and it really only results in countless, needless lines drawn in the sand.

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