Ask HN: Should I invest time for learning Go? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I invest time for learning Go?

17 pointsdiminish7 comments

Seeing Google cleanup, anything non-mainstream, do you think it makes sense to invest any time to learn and invest in Go? Could Google pull the plug on it anytime in the future cleanups? If they do, is there enough non-Google momentum for Go to survive?

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Go is a tool that Google is using to reduce its development costs. It's not something they're looking at from a profit perspective. If it does it's job and makes their development process faster and easier then they have no reason not to keep supporting it. If it doesn't do its job then it's a clear sign that you might want to discontinue using it too.

So far, from what I've seen, companies who use it love it.

I think it's a safe bet that it's not going away and will only get better.

Any Googlers care to chime in on this? I've heard Java and C++ are pretty entrenched in Google these days so there's a lot of inertia to get people to try Go for production level work.

The Go source code is available. Google can stop subsidizing development but they can't stop development. Even if they do, exposing yourself to new programming ideas and concepts is generally a good thing.

Yes, you should.

a) it's very easy to pick up (not an exaggeration). If it's not a good fit for you, you'll probably know within a week or two.

b) it's fun, especially if you've been knee-deep in script languages for a while like me and suffered from quirky implementations and buggy code with too many run-time errors

c) the community is extremely friendly and helpful (OK, anyone could claim that, but just go look at the google group or the IRC channel and see for yourself)

d) people actually seem to get stuff done with it, I'm amazed at the quality of available libraries.

Learning Go is at the absolute top of my todo list. I went to an intro talk about Go at Google in Montreal last week and I was flabbergasted. It looks amazing and I can't wait to write it.

I don't think I understand your concerns about it, though. It's open source. It's a new evolving paradigm with and language concurrency planned from the start. At the very least, it will be good for your brain to learn it. And it has momentum both inside and outside of Google. It's my understanding that much of YouTube is written in Go.

tldr; YES !

You have to recognise the Go was spearheaded by folks who were there from the earliest days of Unix and Plan9 (used by IBM supercomputers). They know how not do do things. With all that experience you can accept that they have the experience to make good decisions. And those decisions are clearly documented and explained in the various documents.

From a technical side, Go is statically linked. So can cross-compile and not have to face DLL nor shared library hells. Whilst the resulting binaries are larger than those that use shared libraries you can have many goroutines running at once. Each goroutine uses only a small amount of stack space. So for any production sized project the ease of deployment outweighs any incremental memory usage. After all, these days 32G or more memory is not unusual.

On Google AppEngine - Go programs run faster and consume less resources than comparable programs written in Python and Java. Google is run by some very smart folks. They are unlikely to be going down a unviable path.

Wondering the same

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