> large scale collaboration
What does golang have to facilitate large scale collaboration that isn't done better in languages such as Java or C#?
What does golang have to facilitate large scale collaboration that isn't done better in languages such as Java or C#?
Since engineers spend most of their time reading and debugging, readability and low abstractions facilitate collaboration: it should be relatively straightforward to jump into any Go codebase.
People often laud the relative ease of picking up the language. They're productive quickly, that's not by accident.
> People often laud the relative ease of picking up the language.
That's not a great metric to measure the effectiveness of a language. Furthermore, there are still gotchas that people have to learn to be aware of, and patterns of how the language does things that need to be learned. Again, the same can be said of Java/C#.
For example splitting a collection with a predicate in FP jargon would be „partition“. The function name is descriptive and universal (to those who know it). In Go it is another for loop, which is more verbose, can be implemented in different ways and doesn’t show intent until read and understood.
This rather small example shows how Go programming (read: reading/writing code) doesn’t scale as well with better understanding and experience, as programming in more expressive languages.
Note that I‘m not saying that this is absolutely good/bad. There are obvious merits to Go‘s approach.
- Auto-formatting
- Good first-party testing and benchmarking
- Ppprof runs circles around VisualVM
All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great.
On a meta level, combination of the AST package and deterministic code formatting means it's relatively easy to write programs that manipulate source code.
It's great if you're just starting out, but it's irrelevant in the long run. It can even be harmful when it's coupled with the language, as you get things like having the packaging tool become deprecated, like with go dep, since a 3rd party tool can't compete with a first party tool for adoption, especially in a relatively young language like Go.
For pprof vs VisualVM - I haven't yet done a lot of CPU profiling with them, but for memory I have had the exact opposite experience. VisualVM and Eclipse MAT are much easier to understand and have much more functionality for analyzing the memory of a Java process than pprof offers.
Not sure what (pseudo-)deterministic code formatting has to do with the ease of manipulating program code, but having a built-in AST package is indeed a good idea. Too bad it hasn't been used to write any useful refactoring tools for Go (outside of JetBrains Goland? Haven't tried that yet). I have heard that Google uses go fix recipes to make modifications across their code base, but haven't seen any examples, and I doubt it can realistically be done in a code base that is not ridiculously well tested, and that it didn't require any manual intervention in a few corner cases in Google as well (assuming they did more than a rename).
Code formatters are available in Java/C# but not ones that have a default set in stone.
And if you care about style trivialities ,you'll still need an external linter, since go fmt doesn't enforce anything about variable names , line length, function length, comment placement, line breaking and many other things some people like to obsess over.
Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger. If you are writing a complex program, you sometimes need a debugger to quickly figure out what is going wrong, instead of endless theory -> change/log -> rerun cycles.
I disagree. There is a higher chance you need a debugger when trying to understand, say, Scala code versus Go.
> If you are writing a complex program [...]
Complexity of a program depends on its author. Even a stupid simple function can get complex if the programmer is less experienced. Go has a philosophy to simplify things. The community tries to follow this philosophy as much as possible, which is why a lot of Go code is easy to read regardless of how complex the logic is.
In the majority of cases, a need for Go debugger means you are dealing with bad written code. Heck, this idea can be extended to pretty much any language.
Simple code often doesn't need a debugger to be understood. Complex code sometimes does. But code can be complex simply because the problem domain is complex.
Also, a simple tool can very well introduce accidental complexity than a more flexible (and therefore complex) tool. Go is famous for doing so with many of its design choices.
A very good example is if you want to perform a set union of two collections. In many languages, you could simply create a set from each collection and then run the union operation on them. In Go, the easiest way to achieve the same is to use maps and rely on the fact that the keys of a map happen to form a set, while ignoring the value part of the map entirely. This is not only inelegant, it is also unintuitive and it wastes memory, but is at least slightly less complex than writing a set data type for your struct by hand.
Also, even though there is no default built in unit test framework in Java and C#, it would be hard to claim JUnit and NUnit aren't essentially that. Ditto for log4j in Java.
By the way, I'm not sure you can claim to have a logging framework in your language when it can't even differentiate between debug messages, info and error messages. I'm not sure there is any significant project that can rely on Go log that couldn't as easily use stderr/stdout.
1) Extremely fast build times (even for large codebases).
2) The package system plugs directly into Git/Github.
The second reduces friction for distributed/large teams to share packages with a lower administrative burden.
I can't compare to modern Java/C# because I haven't used either for quite some time.
It requires our source control system to be Go-mod-compatible.
It requires commits/tags in source control to publish internal builds.
Its complete reliance on semver completely breaks when you want temporary branches for internal versions.
It makes it very difficult to have multiple Go modules in the same repository.
Overall, it's a horrible system.
Not much faster than C# or Java in practice, especially when using a build system that caches your build so you don't have to rebuild everything every time. The difference actually gets smaller the larger the program is. Furthermore, it's (unit/functional/integration) tests that usually take the longer time to run anyway, which you have to execute before submitting your diffs (and caching helps there as well).
> 2) The package system plugs directly into Git/Github.
This doesn't suite everyone, as not all projects are open source.
> with a lower administrative burden.
Any serious company is not going to (1) allow arbitrary code to be pulled from github/etc. and (2) needs to maintain a local repository of it anyway in case github/maven/etc. goes down.
Go compile times are pretty inarguably faster than these in practice, yes.
Compilation time between them is a magnitude apart it's not even arguable.
[0] https://arslan.io/2019/08/02/why-you-should-use-a-go-module-...
Parent said "Git/Github". You can use private git repo, you can use private github repo.
Pascal and Modula-2 compilers were already doing that in MS-DOS days.
As several other AOT toolchains.