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Comment by renewedrebecca | Hacker News Reader

How comfy is go for general native performance coding tasks? Basically looking for a C/C++ replacement. (I don't really like how Rust looks syntactically, and prefer GC over manual memory management.)

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If you're looking for the absolute top speed, it's not as fast as C++ or rust. Assembly functions can't be inlined, for example. But go allows you to control your memory structures and that gets you good cache utilisation, compared to, say java. Go is plenty fast enough for most applications.

As C replacement, I would say relatively ok, specially if you look at it from the point of view of Limbo in Inferno.

As C++ replacement, I would stay is too lacking in features. For that I would rather reach out to C#, D, Java (with OpenJ9/Graal), or even Haskell/OCaml.

Personal experience is great, though for large projects C++ is definitely more robust.

Really like how go handles parallelism and creating threads.

I think Go is a really good fit to write async servers. Its set of features make it a killer language for that use case.

I'm curious what are some of the reasons C++ is better for large projects?

> I don't really like how Rust looks syntactically

I thought I was the only one!

It’s generally designed to be the replacement you’re looking for. It comes from google, who has a lot of C++ code. Its memory managed, but relatively fast. You can’t beat languages that are designed for speed (c, rust) but it’s not python, and it’s closer to rust than python in terms of speed. Similar to Java probably. If you’re writing a web server or anything similar you’ll be fine. I wouldn’t reach for it to crunch numbers though (eg a ML model, image manipulation).

Look into Nim or Zig instead if you're coming from C++

I would also recommend to take a look at D.

I'm not an expert at all, but I wouldn't. I would reach for nim or even zig before go. But it depends on what you're building, I'm sure!

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