It really is striking to me that it is so popular to dislike Go on HN. A lot of people seem to have to voice their dislike for it instead of just not using the language.
1) The discussion gives insight to people who have never used Go. The usual way of getting that kind of knowledge is to shoot yourself in the foot and learn from it.
2) The back-and-forth can provide useful advice on how to work around certain problems in Go.
3) Language designers can always use these discussions to guide and inform their decisions. "Hmmmm, haven't thought of that, better make sure my language doesn't do this; that other thing is an acceptable tradeoff, though."
Additionally, I think it's important to point out the flaws or, maybe better-put "trade-offs" of technologies, especially when they are very popular. I think it's important to temper the hype and share collective engineering wisdom.
I think more constructive articles and titles would be like "What I Wish I Could Change About Golang" and would include background on how long the author has been writing Go and in what context.
It's normal. After the initial hype 3/4 years ago, developers are taking a harder look at that language and with experience its flaws have become more obvious.
Go type system definitely has problems that aren't addressed by its designers, IMHO limiting its adoption.
> A lot of people seem to have to voice their dislike for it instead of just not using the language.
One can use a language daily while still remaining critical of it. People who don't use Go don't care about Go. Only people using Go will complain about its shortcomings.
A lot of Go issues have actually been addressed in previous languages such as Ada. Ada tasks for instance are close to go-routines and they use the same "select" system to deal with concurrent messages. However, Ada tasks unlike go-routines are "objects" that can be referenced as variable, they also can scheduled by the developer.
There is not a single language out there free of criticism, Go isn't different. So it shouldn't really be striking at all.
Wouldn't that break the promise of backwards compatibility that they made with major versions? They could probably do that in Go 2.
Personally, I think D is a more mature language, design wise, although it's a bit lacking in terms of libraries compared to Go and the tooling is, also lacking compared to Rust.
Even if I don’t us a language, I very much enjoy these sorts of “after x years review” since I definitely won’t be getting x years in each. They force me think in terms of doing things with a computer easily/language design, which is the point of all of this. This perspective help me see the shortcomings in whatever language I’m using and helps me remember to not get stuck in it.
Go and its history shares a lot of similarities with Java, but it hasn't had its 5.0 moment yet
I think pouring cold water on excessive hype is, on balance, probably a good thing.
Just like this guy you (or your colleges) might actually have been fooled by curiosity and hype to write some code and put it in production, and when you realize how bad it actually is (this was only a personal top 10). At least you should try to fight back against the hype and try to warn people.
Still think the general sentiment is quite go positive overall, go definitely needs more critique.
EDIT: Why the downvoting? Sure, there are valid issues with golang, but there are also a small but vocal minority on HN who enjoy being rude to Google because they don't like Google, which is what my comment relates to. I certainly don't have any axe to grind with the author, the article, or the commenter to whom I'm responding. It was just a perspective on why, in general, golang might get more of a slating than it perhaps deserves, and I acknowledge that amongst that there will obviously be some people who have many valid reasons not to like golang. Sheesh.
I work and live in SF. Of people I talk to in real life who’ve used golang for non-Google, non-toy projects, sentiment is at least 4-to-1 against it, and in my anecdata that ratio generally increases as people use it for longer.
The one consistent praise I’ve heard that seems genuine (and that I don’t entirely disagree with) is that it’s easy for a new team member to jump on board and be productive. Which sounds great, but if this is what you’re optimizing for at (in my opinion) the expense of nearly everything else, then it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy of high turnover.
1) Value types - in Java if you want an array of objects of a non-primitive type, each one will be individually heap allocated (with some extra per-object overhead) and stored as an array of pointers (may change in Java 10). Go allows objects to be linear in memory with no overhead.
2) Slices everywhere - in Go slices are the default list representation. This allows any API that takes a list of objects to be passed a range of a bigger list, without copying/allocating.
3) Low-latency garbage collector - I believe Go has one of the lowest latency garbage collectors in common use (sub-1ms pauses). I realize Java has several options, but I think Go's is lower latency than all but some commercial/exotic ones like Zing. This is not saying the GC is better all around, just on latency. It's also relatively easy to minimize allocations in Go due to value types.
4) Low-overhead concurrency - lightweight tasks with no blocking/non-blocking dichotomy in APIs. But threads can scale up a lot, so this might not be a big benefit depending on the application.
5) Interior pointers - you can lay out structures linearly, and still use interior pointers. Also, you can use them as interfaces without allocating any 'boxed' objects.
There's probably more, but these are the things that come to mind right now. Looking back on this list, all of them are performance related. So if an application isn't performance sensitive in any of these ways I guess it would be understandable that someone might not see much in it, compared to a language with a higher learning curve but a lot of conveniences like Kotlin. Things like capitalization don't seem that big an issue though... maybe because Go is a simple language the tooling is already pretty good, and you can easily rename to upper/lower case in an IDE like GoLand.
For people unfamiliar with Go and want to see something more than hello world, I think an interesting project to look at is https://github.com/fogleman/pt. It's not enormous but not trivial either and makes use of interfaces, goroutines etc. The author's other projects are great too.
The author of the article doesn't mention Google, but that's not what my comment was about: it was a (very mild) observation that there are some people, and I'm sure by no means the majority nor anywhere close, who will neg on Google and their tech, because they don't like Google.
So after reading about golang over and over, it seems it is going the MongoDB way. A lot of excitement at the start because it's easy and fast to put something out but as soon as maintenance mode needs to kick in, people realize it is not the silver bullet and maybe not even a ok solution.
But isn't that a problem of the whole industry? First a hype gets build up and a lot of people jump on the band wagon. Then the real world kicks in and some complain overly loud and others chime in with "I told you so". Finally a lot of people change the tech stack silently because nobody likes to talk about their failures too much.
I can't say if it is the same with golang, I did not use it at all yet, but some design decisions are at least doubtful.