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Comment by shirogane86x | Hacker News Reader

I don't really buy into go (it's not my type of language), but I wanted to ask a genuine question: are there many semi-mainstream languages that don't have modules that _just work_, or an official plugin for VSCode that just works? I've never found that to be a "plus", as much as it is the bare minimum. and nowadays I don't see that many up and coming languages that miss out on it. Admittedly though the cross compilation is nice (not enough to win me over, at all, but still very nice. The very few times I've needed cross compilation in other languages I reached for nix, and that wasn't very pleasant)

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Most compiled languages have fractured build ecosystems, and may require some tricky invocation orders, external+not-included dependencies, or some funky flags depending on your compiler version. Or may just not work because you have the wrong compiler, missing their preferred build scripting runtime, etc.

NPM (packages) frequently go down, doesn't resolve packages, or just does something unexpected. Java has the Gradle/Maven split, C++ has a few extra common ones - Make/CMake, Autotools, Ninja, Meson, etc. Modern C# is the one that's got a similar scene to Go from what I've seen.

Go is simple and consistent. It adheres to the Zen of Python, particularly "There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.", better than Python itself does (IMO). You check out a repo, you run go build, and 90% of the time you have a binary. A 5 line Python script could automate this process, good luck doing the same with Java or C++.

This is really the selling point of Go for me that makes up for it's shortcomings. I've probably lost years off my life thanks to gradle.

When your build scripts require the power of a full-blown programming language, I do have to wonder what catastrophe lead to such complications! I'm sure there's a reason for it and all, but it's just not something I will deal with unless I am being paid (handsomely) to do so.

I wrote a post about this topic. Consistent tooling is very valuable.

https://earthly.dev/blog/programming-language-improvements/

That is 100% fair. I mostly develop on .NET+TS at $dayjob so I never really have experienced particular problems with nuget, and I've had the luck of never having an npm package go down on me either - so I just never really experienced the problems that people are frustrated about.

You tell me, what other language has a drop-in solution that provides module management, formatting, integration with the debugger, intellisense docs, linting with static analysis while I'm typing, and even testing? The plug-in is actually made by the Go Team at Google, its not like adding Black and Poetry etc. in python, its not even like the moving target that is create-react-app or whatever people use now in JS/TS. Those are much older languages, but what would you compare it to?

I'm not saying Go is the only modern language, its pretty retro in some ways, but it has an exceptional tooling story. The fact that its mainly based around the official go tool helps.

Rust also has those things. (It also has performance profiling, fuzz testing, benchmarking tools, etc, etc., as I'm guessing golang does.)

Thats dope, and I kind of figured.

The tooling is probably why Go and Rust get compared so often, despite having little in common. Its weird to see that written off as a common feature though. It was nothing like my experience with clojure or julia.

If there are any languages with Go-like tooling that have a bigger job market, I'd love to know.

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