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Comment by frollogaston | Hacker News Reader

Golang having solid n:m greenthreading day 1 was its big deal. Java has had no good way to do IO-heavy multitasking, leading to all those async/promise frameworks that jack up your code. I cannot even read the Java code we have at work. Java recently got virtual threads, but even if that fixes the problem, it'll be a while before things change to that. Python had the same problem before asyncio. This isn't even a niche thing, your typical web backend needs cooperative multitasking.

I'm also not fond of any of the Golang syntax, especially not having exceptions. Or if you want explicit errors, fine, at least provide nice unwrap syntax like Rust does.

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by FAR my biggest complaint about Golang was null instead of Option. could have been special cased like their slice and map and would have been so so so much better than nil checks imho. really, a big miss.

Java 21 has n:m green threads, but with caveats. Java 24 removed a major source of the caveats.

Yeah, I'm hoping that fixes things eventually. We still can't use that at work, and even once we can, there's 10yo code still using 3 different old ways of async.

I'm sure you're already aware but for those who aren't - Java 21 was released in 2023. Golang 1.0 was released in 2012.

In 2012 we could do much of the same stuff with Java 5 concurrency framework and futures (aka promises everyone raves about on JS land), with the advance that scheduling can be customised.

That's what I meant by unreadable code. You have to twist everything to work with whatever async framework.

Have you ever had to write down channel sending dependencies graph?

I had to, to make sense of whatever was going on.

If this is an app backend, you aren't dealing with Golang channels directly. Your webserver or whatever it is spawns a new goroutine (greenthread) for each incoming request, then you use blocking calls without worrying. Looks similar in JS but the event loop handles it instead, and you async/await stuff. JS webpages and app frontends also don't worry about this.

If this is systems programming, yeah you're reasoning about channels, but that's mostly the same in any language. Golang has slightly nicer support for that if anything.

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