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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

I was a fan in the past and still think the language has niches it's good at. I just no longer think it's a good general purpose language - more correctly I think there are languages that are better than Go in every metric that counts for general purpose use cases.

I invested a lot of time and work in the language (about 4 years professionally) but become disillusioned with it over time.

The big reasons for no longer liking the language stem from decisions made around the type system (this being the main reason), tooling (namely packaging, vendoring/modules bleh) and weariness with the verbosity and logic per line density.

So when would I still pick it?

I would pick Go if I specifically need to shuffle bytes between sockets with high I/O concurrency and don't need access to C libraries or any complex logic at all. The moment there is business logic I don't want to be writing Go anymore.

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I'm still using it daily, and I think it's a "nicer C", perhaps sometimes even a "nicer C++" or "nicer Java" in a few ways. But I agree that as a general purpose language it's definitely lacking. No other language has inspired me to fight against its design and philosophy or overcome its deficiencies as much as go has ([1] [2] [3]). But for many purposes it's "good enough", and at least it's simple enough to dig around in the guts when I have to.

[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/go

[2] https://github.com/kstenerud/go-describe

[3] https://github.com/kstenerud/go-subvert

> The moment there is business logic I don't want to be writing Go anymore.

What do you prefer for writing business logic type apps then?

Clojure

For me right now it's Kotlin. I believe it picks a good balance of simplicity/readability vs expressibility/power.

In particular I find it's generics, data classes, infix operators and extension functions very useful for expressing business logic concisely.

These features let me write half (or less in many cases) the code I might need to in Go.

More importantly is Kotlin is much easier to refactor. Part of that is there is just less code to refactor, the other important piece is tooling and IDE providing awesome automatic refactoring tools.

Elixir, Erlang, and Clojure, to name a few.

OCaml. For example here are some types I wrote that exactly describe an HTTP cache-control response header in a way that makes it impossible to create incorrect values of the header: https://yawaramin.github.io/re-web/re-web/ReWeb/Header/Cache...

> access to C libraries

Have you tried the "cgo" facility and found it lacking? If so, how?

cgo is easy to use but pretty literally opts you into a different language entirely: https://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go

Yeah pretty much.

Using cgo has been the source of near endless pain for me when writing systems software. It criples portability, drastically changes runtime behaviours and generally is best dealt with by CGO_ENABLED=0.

In addition, cgo calls are often reeely slow. I've been using the sqlite bindings to go for projects recently. sqlite doesn't allow you to write your own in-language functions, but instead allows you to write your own callback. I recently did some benchmarks, and the golang callback for a simple function was 20x slower than implementing it in C (1600us vs 80us), presumably due to all the marshaling and reflection required.

Yes, you really don't want to use cgo to call small functions or helpers, the overhead is enormous.

> vendoring/modules bleh

Can you expand on your objection to the new Go module design?

https://research.swtch.com/

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