How is it different than, say, java for this generalist purpose?
1) go is more "batteries included". Modules, linting, testing, and much more are all part of the standard cli. Also, the go stdlib has a ton of stuff; in java, there is almost always a well-built third party library, but that requires you to find and learn more things instead of just reaching for stdlib every time.
2) golang is "newer" and "more refined". this is pretty subjective, but golang seems to have fewer features and the features are more well-planned. It's a more "compact" or "ergonomic" language. Whereas java has built up a lot of different features and not all of them are great. You can always ignore the java features you don't like ofc, but this is still a bit of cognitive overhead and increased learning time.
Go is not my favorite language, but it really is exceptional in terms of its effective utilitarian design.
Also, while the cli to add stuff is useful, there's still nothing to the level of maven or gradle for dependency management, and I usually find myself doing some fun stuff with `find -execdir` for module management.
Different strokes for different folks though. Java (really, kotlin) still makes a ton of sense for backend to me given how the jvm is architecture independent and you don't have to make tradeoffs/switch to graal if it's a long lived service.
Golang is nice, love it, but it's still got a bit to grow. I'm just happy they added modules and generics. I don't think it's a matter of being 'well thought out' as much as it's a simple language that cares a lot about simplicity and backwards compatibility and has iterated ever since. For my the killer app isn't go routines so much as you can produce a binary that's resilient even to shared/dynamically linked libraries in all platforms, which is awesome for portability independent of environment. No more gcc vs clang vs msvc headaches, no more incompatible shared libraries, no more wrong version of jvm or a bad python modules path etc.
Oh, also java had like a 15 year headstart on golang, and it wasn't until java 8 that many of my biggest complaints were addressed. And yeah stuff like apache commons +log4j+mockito/junit are pretty much required dependencies, and maven/gradle aren't language native.
The best STL is probably python imo but even that doesn't support a proper heap/priority queue inplementation. For data structures specifically I think java/kotlin has the best STL. All of this ignoring .NET or apple platforms.
map[T]struct{} ?
I generally agree with what you are saying. Although I wouldn’t hold out Maven as a paragon. I used to make my living untangling pom.xml files. I don’t think anybody is feeding their family helping people with go.mod messes — although I wish somebody would do that for kubernetes.
Yup! Lots of good stuff in the go/x libraries, happy map.Keys is graduating.
Also totally agreed on maven not being an ideal, or even lovable dependency management system, but trust me that there are absolutely people spending too much time wrangling go.mod files, especially in open source where go.mod files cross repo boundaries (and thus consolidated test automation).
I typically do a bunch of git reset --hard's as I iterate on my find -exec to run the golang cli commands for module upgrades (for whenever rennovate fails). I like how it's much easier to experiment with over maven (maybe I just didn't know maven well enough), but it's still definitely a headache.
But I do think go and java are very comparable languages. To me, go's advantage over java is more about use-case; go is the clear choice for little cli tools, because it's pretty far off the beaten path to coax java to start up quickly enough for this. This is the sweet spot for go, IMO.
What JVM do I use? Does it matter?
Does it matter what version I install, what if I have to install/manage multiple versions?
If I want to write a web service can I use vanilla Java stdlib or do I have to use Spring or some framework? If I use Spring, do I have to get into the weeds of dependency injection and other complexity to actually get my app off the ground?
With Go, none of those questions exist. I install the latest Go, create a main.go file, I use net/http and I'm off to the races.
But it's not something that is unique to Go:
dotnet new web
dotnet run
curl localhost:5050
When one doesn't know, just like with Go, one picks up the reference implementation => OpenJDK.
For basic stuff, the standard library also has you covered in the jdk.httpserver module.
By the way, where is the Swing equivalent on Go's standard library?
latest LTS (longterm-support) version, so currently 21, next 25 (late 2025).
> Does it matter?
new is always better
> what if I have to install/manage multiple versions?
> If I want to write a web service can I use vanilla Java stdlib or do I have to use Spring or some framework?
Spring
> If I use Spring, do I have to get into the weeds of dependency injection
yes, but it's not hard (or I've done it long enough)
> other complexity
that might just be inherent complexity when have to deal with a webservice. personally I dislike have to configure security
So basically go to Spring Initializr (https://start.spring.io/) pick the latest LTS Java&Maven (or Kotlin&Gradle-Kotlin) and You're off to the races.
I would need to compare it with, for example, Java + Spring(Boot).
I find Go to be simpler and more pleasant to use.
Publishing libraries for your own consumption is even harder.
Publishing libraries for world consumption means now you also need to be a PKI expert.