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Comment by miffy900 | Hacker News Reader

> First things first, let’s establish some ground. Go is a good language for writing servers, but Go is not a language for writing servers. Go is a general purpose programming language, just like C, C++, Java or Python

Really? Even years later in 2025, this never ended up being true. Unless your definition of 'general purpose' specifically excludes anything UI-related, like on desktop, web or mobile, or AI-related.

I know it's written in 2017, but reading it now in 2025 and seeing the author comparing it to Python of all languages in the context of it's supposed 'general purpose'ness is just laughable. Even Flutter doesn't support go. granted, that seems like a very deliberate decision to justify Dart's existence.

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It is not.

Link to previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14958989

> https://golang.org/doc/faq#What_is_the_purpose_of_the_projec...: "By its design, Go proposes an approach for the construction of system software on multicore machines."

> That page points to https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article for "A much more expansive answer to this question". That article states:

> "Go is a programming language designed by Google to help solve Google's problems [...] More than most general-purpose programming languages, Go was designed to address a set of software engineering issues that we had been exposed to in the construction of large server software."

In an alternative timeline, had Rust 1.0 been available when Docker pivoted away from Python into Go, and Kubernetes from Java into Go, due to having Go folks pushing for the rewrite, and most likely they would have been taken by RIIR instead, nowadays spreading across Python and JavaScript ecosystem, including rewriting tools originally written in Go.

Nope. Rust is not a good tool for servers. It's downright terrible, in fact. Goroutines help _a_ _lot_ with concurrency.

Go tell that to Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft.

> Unless your definition of 'general purpose' specifically excludes anything UI-related, like on desktop, web or mobile, or AI-related.

By that definition no language is general purpose. There is no language today that excels in GUI (desktop/mobile), web development, AI, cloud infrastructure, and all the other stuff like systems, embedded...And all at the same time.

For instance I have never seen or heard of a successful Python desktop app (or mobile for that matter).

I think the whole argument here is silly, but I do know kitty (terminal) and Calibre (ebook manager) are two rather popular cross platform python desktop apps.

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