Comment by tmerr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmerr | Hacker News Reader

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Eh? I can't speak for all of Google but I like me some Go. It has a culture of minimalism both in language and code, which makes it easy to pick up and read others' work. I wouldn't recommend it for all problems, but it's at least nice for backend services.

Java is a victim of its own success: it has lived through style evolutions which have lead to fragmentation in the ecosystem. Some code uses mutable datastructures with for loops, others immutable datastructures with the stream API. Some code uses dependency injection, while some doesn't. As a result it takes more time to mentally calibrate to the style when pulling up a .java file. Another imperfection: GC pauses can cause request timeouts and are annoying to debug.

Python's not perfect either: aside from the obvious performance issues, use of the awkward retrofitted type system makes me wonder why a statically typed language isn't being used to begin with. The lack of good static analysis is especially annoying at Google where the tooling is quite good.

Just my 2c

> it has lived through style evolutions

The same can be said for C++, C#, etc. that have been around for a long enough time. Golang is relatively speaking still new. Look back at this again if golang adds generics and other features that will change how code in it is written.

> Another imperfection: GC pauses can cause request timeouts and are annoying to debug.

That's not an issue with Java, but how the GC is tuned. Golang provides only 1 gc that is tuned for latency. And even that is not hard real time. The JVM has several GCs you can choose from, including latency optimized ones.

>Look back at this again if golang adds generics and other features that will change how code in it is written.

Absolutely. I was surprised by the number of proposed changes in Go 2, especially regarding error handling. Curious whether old code will be migrated or left behind.

>That's not an issue with Java, but how the GC is tuned

Good point, I haven't done much GC tweaking personally but that sounds worth learning more about. However I think language might have something to do with it: In Java almost everything is a referenceable object, while in Go one can put values directly inside structs. So Go has less work to do. Without that advantage I doubt it would seem competitive with Java GCs.

Java will be getting value types in an upcoming version. C# already has value types (called structs). The JVM also does escape analysis to avoid heap allocation when it can.

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