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Comment by frehpt | Hacker News Reader

Option A:

  -Write your application in Go

Option B:

  -Write application in Ruby
  -Profile Ruby application to identify code to be rewritten in C
  -Learn C if you don't already know it
  -Rewrite various parts of your application in C
  -Run Valgrind to search for memleaks
  -Ensure that your target systems all have required libs installed

Option A seems much simpler...

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Sure it does, right up until you also need libraries that Ruby has but Go doesn't. Also you're trading away a few language features to get Go, so between the two you're tossing a lot of programmer time out the door to avoid writing in C. Maybe that's still a worthwhile trade, but it's not really a simple one.

>Sure it does, right up until you also need libraries that Ruby has but Go doesn't.

Now replace go with ruby and ruby with perl. Go has libraries for 99% of what people are doing with ruby. If you are in that 1%, then you need to evaluate whether or not it is worth writing the library you need or if you should use another language.

A quick check led to me not finding a package manager for Go similar to RubyGems. Does it have one? Manually installing dependencies is a colossal waste of time.

It is just go. Do a "go build foo" or "go install foo" and it will handle any dependencies for foo on its own. Do a "go get bar" and it will download and install bar and anything it depends on.

Where are these packages published? Can I install things from this page[1] in that way?

At least from 1000 feet away, it seems like Ruby has this problem solved better than Go does. Maybe it's just that the nature of the solution is more apparent.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Projects

>Where are these packages published?

Anywhere you want to publish them.

>Can I install things from this page[1] in that way?

Sure. Just do a "go install github.com/foo/bar". Bitbucket, github, google code, and launchpad are all in the defaults, but you can configure your import path to add whatever locations you like, and then "go list" will show packages available there, and the other go commands will be able to build/install/etc those. The same syntax is used for import statements, so your code can depend on any code any where:

     import "mycoolwebsite.com/~bob/myproject.git/foo"

>Maybe it's just that the nature of the solution is more apparent.

I think they make it pretty clear: http://golang.org/cmd/go/ gives you pretty much everything about packages and so does "go help". Go pretty much does everything out of the box with the included toolset, from installing dependencies to formatting code to refactoring.

Go does't have 1/100000 the amount of libraries and support that Ruby or C does.

Option A only seems simpler because you ignore the time/complexity in coding the task at hand.

... and the Java programmer laughs in the corner (Let's not talk about generics though).

... of the asylum he's been committed to after having to deal with one too many AbstractFactoryFactory classes.

That's Design Patterns code. I'm sure that if I start programming seriously in Java, I can bring all the readability of C with me!

Why not 1/10e100? Or even less? Go's library support is quite nice already and it's growing really fast.

Because I am being realistic. Ruby, C, Java etc have had decades to build a comprehensive set of developer libraries. Go hasn't.

It's a "cute" platform that I am sure will beat Ruby in a few benchmarks. But I don't see any reason why anyone would seriously consider it for a real world app.

Ruby has a sprawling ecosystem of libraries largely drawn into being by Rails (itself a sprawl) and by design decisions in Ruby's core and stdlib that complicate things and need further code to work around. Threads and fibers and events, oh my. Each workaround has its own ecosystem. You could even consider things like rack and unicorn workarounds for the weak implementations in stdlib.

I don't think Ruby's libraries honestly provide a whole lot better coverage than Go. The stdlib is very well considered. It's fast, it scales, it's thread safe in the appropriate places. It's not a toy implementation. What it doesn't provide, it provides hooks for. Third party libs cover all the major bases. And unlike Ruby, writing interfacing code in Go is a snip. I don't see libraries as a downside.

(With one exception. Why oh why did they not include a bigdecimal? Argh, a ratio type is not an adequate replacement. Try rounding a ratio some time. Blarg.)

Well for one Go beats Ruby in every benchmark that I am aware of, and generally by quite some distance.

Also realistically 60-70% of all libraries created for other languages are bitrotted to junk or pointlessness by this point.

If you can't see why an app that fits within the worked problemspace of Go (and even with the current libraries plenty of things are wholly doable in Go) and will require much less server resources might be a good fit, then you shouldn't be making those decisions, because that is the thought pattern of a zealot.

Look Ruby is well supported, established, and proven, but it is also slow. For a lot of things that is fine, but if you are dealing with something that requires a lot of serverside work on low margins it will kill you dead. Horses for courses.

The point is if you need the performance, C is the more natural choice for a lot of it at this point. I looked through one of the Go tutorials a while back, and it was WTF after WTF. If it works for you, fine, but Go has a long way to go to be interesting for a lot of us.

C will give you 2 times the performance with 1/2 the memory usage of Go for 10 times the development effort, if you are skilled at optimizing C.

Never mind its trivial to call C from Go.... http://blog.golang.org/2011/03/c-go-cgo.html

P.S. Lots of people including me write lots of real world applications in Go...

Because in reality, people don't make decisions based on how many duplicate, unmaintained, broken libraries exist for language X. They make them based on "does language X have the libraries I actually need". Oh, json, DB_of_choice, and web framework exist? Gee, I guess 90%+ of people are covered right there. Virtually every language, even as seldom used as say, ocaml, have the libraries that 90% of people actually use. Libraries aren't an issue for the majority of tasks people are doing.

> Go does't have 1/100000 the amount of libraries and support that Ruby or C does.

That's what they used to say about Java...

Yes. Nearly 20 years ago.

But don't worry the JVM can save you. http://code.google.com/p/jgo/

That's a ridiculous set of alternatives.

It's not.

The bottom line is: the time necessary to optimize Ruby to run below 8 minutes was bigger than he could afford, and apparently Go, once written (which apparently gave the OP some issues) needn't be optimized.

That said, Go wasn't necessarily the better choice, because of the subtlety that made the Go program overflow silently. Writing the solution in Scala or even in JS would have probably given him less of an issue.

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