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Comment by fwsgonzo | Hacker News Reader

For me Go is unique in that it can produce a fully static binary that can fetch from a HTTPS endpoint. It also supports many architectures. On top of that the package system and it's just way more convenient to use than other languages. Easy to learn, easy to put somewhere in practice.

Not every program has to be 100% safe and delivering 2M req/s. Sometimes you just want to build a program once and ship it.

What other language has that? Go isn't perfect though. It's startup sequence is long, the API towards C (and other languages) is quite bad, and if you build a fibonacci program and compare it with C it's 3x slower despite requiring no allocations whatsoever.

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> For me Go is unique in that it can produce a fully static binary that can fetch from a HTTPS endpoint.

What do you mean? C, C++, D, Rust, Haskell, and Common Lisp seem to be capable of static linking. (Admittedly Common Lisp seems to require a fork of SBCL that was written about last year, but still)

In Go that quote is literally true. If you do nothing on a new computer but download Go you can immediately build a statically linked application that can fetch from an https endpoint. There are no implied additional steps.

I don't believe this can be said of the other languages. I know that C, C++ and Rust do not include https in their standard libraries, so while they can be made to compile statically and use a library that provides https functionality, those are additional steps that must be taken by the developer, and it is the responsibility of the developer to choose the correct source and version of the https library to use. This will also include understanding and setting any additional compiler flags that the library may require, setting any optional defines or other library configuration settings and making the appropriate changes for every platform they wish to build for.

Go requires none of this.

> that can fetch from a HTTPS endpoint.

Seems like a lot of replies are glossing over that clause. How many of those other languages can do that in a fully static binary that runs on (almost) any system that can read and launch that executable?

It's glossed over because it's trivial, isn't it? Just statically link libcurl through a binding. And at least Haskell also has Haskell-implemented HTTP and TLS libraries. There's even options.

Then why not assume it is the static linking that is trivial? Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon.

The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such libraries.

I also work in C++, and it is infuriating the amount of time that must be spent sorting out the correct libraries for all the various aspects of an application one is not inclined to write themselves. People who don't fully grok the Go ecosystem overlook this cost when they claim that you can do the same thing in some other language. What they are missing in the subtext is the fundamental quality of life improvement.

> Isolated each item is trivial in some context, its the exclusive set that is non-trivial, or at least uncommon.

I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence.

> The fact https is included in the standard library means that you can give a new user a hello world tutorial that includes producing a web server. It's a huge boon to productivity in a programming language to have a default path for such libraries.

I think you're taking our discussion as if it were about if the language is cool or not. I never argued against that.

> I'm not just taking it in isolation for no reason. If you have static linking, you basically have HTTPS by consequence.

Can you clarify what you mean by this because to me there is literally nothing about static linking that implies https as a consequence. The point about Go is centrally not that it uniquely has access to an https library.

The point is that it is included. This may not at first appear all that noteworthy, but this is a substantive quality of life improvement. The standard library not only provides a vary large set of common functionality it is packaged with the distribution, works on all the platforms supported by Go without user intervention, and is bound in lock step to the release version of the compiler.

Static linking predates dynamic linking by several decades, hardly unique.

Wait, what prior programming language is compiled, can be statically linked, and has an https implementation in it's standard library?

fwsgonzo never said anything about it being in the standard library.

The convenience of building network clients in Go is heavily implied. Strictly you can say that assembly code can make standalone binary HTTPS endpoints, but that would be a bit silly.

To be sure you might write such a program in assembly, but you’d be doing it for fun or aesthetics. No engineering manager would commission such a thing.

Though of course this is inviting the trading maniacs to tell stories of hyper optimized clients…

HTTP doesn’t need to be in stdlib. Java and Python each had one but everyone long since switched to third-party reimplementations with better APIs. And HTTP will probably be replaced over the next twenty years, like FTP and Sun RPC and CORBA before it.

Ok, but it's not either Go or assembly. There's other languages. I listed 6 in a close-by comment. I wonder if Go's much more convenient at network clients than, say, Haskell or Common Lisp.

Well that's not on him man. You are the one calling him out for being unaware of static linking, when you don't even seem to understand the full set of pros he listed in his first sentience.

You're not replying to the same person. In a separate comment, I asked for a clarification on that specific part of their comment. The other pros, they're not part of what I asked about.

In the comment I replied to you, I'm just stating that you're bringing up something that's not in discussion.

Sorry for the misattribution, my mistake. Nevertheless, the fact remains that https is a part of the standard library and one of the elements that the op finds unique about Go. It is unambiguously part of the conversation, and the ostensibly negative comment that focuses on static linking is missing the point.

But I didn't even make the assumption that I was right on that understanding. I simply asked for more detail. Which was so that either I would learn something new, or the parent would.

> https is a part of the standard library and one of the elements that the op finds unique about Go.

Where do they say that it being part of the standard library is unique? I don't even see the words "standard library" mentioned.

EDIT: Look, this back and forth seems kind of pointless. This started with a statement about Go being unique for being able to be statically linked and talk HTTPS. If a language can be linked to compiled libraries, static or not, it's surely able to at least use libcurl, so I and the other commenter you replied to took it as Go is unique for being able to link statically. I assumed they meant, ignoring C/C++, static linking is rare, which I found interesting. I found other languages and asked for clarification. That's all.

I just addressed this question more directly on your other comment.

I do not agree that it is incumbent upon a speaker to anticipate the listeners knowledge, so I do not think it is a reasonable expectation that every qualifier be included. It's simply not practical. But I do think this is an interesting conversation you bring up.

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