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Comment by kkfx | Hacker News Reader

While prizing any FLOSS project I'm curious why... I can understand Clojure, giving Lisp on top of the enormous Java codebase have some practical reasons, but Go so far have a relatively small public set of libs so why instead of a Lisp written in Lisp, like SBCL?

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Huh? Go has an enormous and high quality std lib and even larger set of community libs. On top of that its popularity is exploading. I’ve never seen a language rise in popularity as much as Go.

Have a high quality stdlib, but nothing other languages do not have. There are many community libs, but again nothing that special, also the popularity rise for a language transpiled on top is not much a thing...

Java exists today in many places where change codebase is a nightmare and keep up software is no less a nightmare so having a more manageable language able to insert itself in the old ecosystem is valuable, but on a moderately new language with nothing so big to be in a state of needing a nightmarish replacement why?

It's like Hy for Python: it's nice, a programming exercise but for what more than the technical piece? How many Python programs need a new language while remain on their own python VM? How many Python programmers want lisp with Python underneath?

I think the real issue is that Go is its runtime, including garbage collection but also coroutine scheduling, syscall management (syscalls effectively enter 'gospace' before kernelspace), etc. Go's docs liken it to crt0, which is entirely dishonest. You can't have verifiable deterministic programs with a runtime like this which extends way beyond a small setup routine. That's generally 'fine in practice' for application development - especially the Python-level programs which are generally written in Go - but for building another language (interpreter) atop it, it strikes me as madness.

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