Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimgl | Hacker News Reader

I liked the article. I think it was really well written and these are great points. So if not Go, then what's the alternative? I too am starting to feel a bit burnt out by some of Go's deficiencies, but one of the things I really like about Go is its concurrency model. What other languages have great concurrency models? Please keep in mind that I want to keep things simple... having a single binary to deploy is incredibly efficient.

I've been wanting to use Crystal. Does anyone have experience running Crystal in production? Without getting into the specifics, the Go parts of my personal project are a websocket server that upgrades when a user is authenticated and authorized, and their actions spawn jobs in a queue. I have processors (written in Golang) that take these tasks and perform somewhat complex async actions. Would Crystal fit the bill here? I'd really like to avoid getting into Elixir/Erlang world or any kind of interpreted language that will complicate the deployment process (like Deno or Ruby).

I’ve kicked the tires with a lot of languages, and always end up coming back to Go. It’s a pretty subpar language, but it hits a sweet spot that nothing else does: fast builds, decent tooling, relatively small single binary deployment, pretty good performance out of the box, decent stdlib. I could go on.

I want to use Ocaml or a Lisp or a number of other languages, but Go really does the entire package better than anything I’ve looked at.

Nobody will suggest Java, but honestly Java. Java has pretty great flexibility when it comes down to concurrency. It sets the standard which all the other languages have to compete with.

Apart from that, I like languages and frameworks that scale out of their box and into the world of distributed systems. Elixir is very cool, because the concept of distribution with message passing is built into the core of the language. Alternatively, Scala's Akka Framework operates on a similar concept of passing messages to Actors. My bias here is that I don't like to deal with very large super-computers, and would rather have multiple smaller machines that are allowed to blackout occasionally. This is especially relevant for websockets because the stateful connection to a client can be made on any single machine in a cluster, but the state itself is (often) global.

I'm going to sound very elitist, but there is 0 chance I'm going to use Java. Aside from my own bad experiences with Java in a professional setting, .NET Core is now a thing, and I'm actually very experienced with C#, so I'd rather just use C# at that point rather than become proficient with Java and the JVM.

Rust is the obvious language to consider. It’s concurrency model is arguably better than go’s as it actually statically prevents you from misusing types that aren’t threadsafe.

To be frank I really don't want to deal with Rust's complexity.

> I'd really like to avoid getting into Elixir/Erlang world or any kind of interpreted language that will complicate the deployment process

For what it's worth, the deployment story for Elixir is great. Erlang has a built-in concept of "releases", which Elixir supports natively.

In essence, it compiles all dependencies and outputs a directory containing the VM, and all the compiled bytecode. After that, you just copy the directory to /app on your runtime container (or whatever other kind of deployment method you're using), and it runs fine from there.

That's pretty interesting. I haven't worked with Elixir in many years, I'll take a look.

I like Nim or Zig so far as my home project alternatives to Go...

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