Ask HN: Is Go taking over the startup scene? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Go taking over the startup scene?

27 pointsxstartup20 comments

It seems more and more startups are switching to Go. Is Java already? Are enterprise also moving to Go, or it's just startups who are consuming the hype?

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I doubt it. I work in enterprise in a Danish municipality, but I’m in the digitization/business part so I’m also involved in the 350ish different systems that we’ve bought from tiny-enterprise corporations. I say ish because we’ve only catalogued 180 of our systems effectively and honestly don’t know how many we have or where they are. But that’s another story.

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who was using Go outside hobby projects. The enterprise stack is 70% JAVA and 25% .NET with the remaining 5% being node.js/PHP. Apps are rapidly moving to web-apps with java script frontends, mainly angular. In the operations part, almost everything in public enterprise is moving to powershell, and things are slowly moving to either azure or aws.

Our public sector is heavily tied to Microsoft, ie powershell, and I’m not sure what Linux heavy corporate enterprise is doing in ops.

On the startup/student side things are run in many different techs. I think PHP is easily the most widespread, but we’re seeing more and more of node.js and .net core.

Honestly none of the new techs seem like good bets when you’ve got a stack tied to something else. Sure we could adopt Go, but retraining 25 people who’ve worked mainly with Microsoft tech for 5-25 years seems silly when we might as well adopt .Net core, and you’ll see a similar story in JAVA or PHP.

You are getting downvoged because op was talking about startups not public sector or corps.

Well, he also asked abou enterprise, but I don’t mind being downvoted. If people don’t find my response useful, then so be it.

Something to consider: you only hear from those startups that move to Go. You don't see startups making blog posts talking about how they're staying with Java or C# or C++ or Python (you sometimes do, but posts like that are pretty rare).

Go has a sweet spot and it’s infrastructure and middleware. Do you need a custom dns server? Use go and write one in an afternoon. Need a custom caching solution? Same thing. That’s where I’ve seen go really shine. YMMV

This comment seems unrelated to the one it's replying to. Did you mean to respond to a different comment or at the top level maybe?

I agree with your comment, but:

> Do you need a custom dns server? Use go and write one in an afternoon.

You forgot the part where you shout at your code for a year until it finally implements all of DNS.

There is no doubt that Go is a good language and it's getting popular more than ever. But NO it's not taking over startup scene yet!

Probably nothing even close to what JS is doing in term of numbers and grow if you want to compare languages by usage. (which doesn't mean anything)

Go is just new and shiny comparing to Java, Ruby, C/C++, PHP or Python.

Nobody is going to write much about why we're building our startup with Java or PHP or C++ cos it's just boring and repetitive! Not cool!!

But hell yeah, You will write when you do Go, Elixir, Rust, or Kotlin cos people are gonna read it.

Depend on what you're going to build and your resources, you will choose your stack and one or more programming languages to start.

Perhaps people using Go, Elixir, Rust, or Kotlin to build something in a startup are expecting to make money selling the skills they gained building it rather than expecting to make money from the software they build.

No Go is not taking over. There are startups which are moving to Go and are vocal about the improvements. Lot of people/companies are happy with their current(Java/Python/Ruby) stack.

It is very difficult to change stack in Enterprise. There is still quite a lot Cobol in Finance domain. I don't think they will be moving from their current stack anytime soon.

There are some larger interesting go projects - even in us government space - although I wouldn’t say that go is taking over enterprise or java/.net somehow. Go is typically used in micro service environments and enterprises often use java/spring boot for such experiments.

I don't expect people to implement a complete HRM, CRM or anything complex with business logic that is not performance hungry. If you look at usage closely you would see microservices that were bottle neck are being replaced, and it totally makes sense. People are writing a high performance PubSub, queues, or HTTP services that are generic enough to be used as part of their infra. I don't see stuff like Java, C#, Ruby, or Node.js etc. getting replaced by Go as defacto. One might ask same question for Rust over Go! Just because a language is getting more buzz or less buzz doesn't mean it's taking over or dead.

It is not even close to taking over. It entrenched itself in an interesting niche - and that's it.

Could you elaborate on how you would describe that niche? Cloud services?

Not a Golang dev myself, but I'd characterize it as server-side applications with high concurrency demands.

Most use cases I see tend to deal with either (1) microservices or (2) modern virtualization solutions, e.g. Docker, Kubernetes. This isn't quite universal though: there are exceptions like CockroachDB and Container Linux.

Ex Amazon here. Most cloud automation across various large companies is written in C, sometimes C++, with plenty of glue code in higher level languages like Python.

Hyped up stuff like Docker & co are the few written in Go and often not mature and stable enough for enterprise.

> Hyped up stuff like Docker & co are the few written in Go and often not mature and stable enough for enterprise.

Haha, you're funny!

Mostly google cloud hosted high performance web services.

flavor of the month Syntactic sugar Johnny come lately

Not even close. It will slowly loose the momentum with .net core and java getting better. As much as i love Go the entire world needs and wants enterprise languages. It wants 1st class support for everything and it wants it now.

Startups will adopt whatever is hyped atm and will rewrite whatever the tech they are building as soon as the next hyped thing gets ready.

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