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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

Yes. A lot.

...and it's perfectly useful for small things.

...and not really useful for serious web applications.

As the article points out, there's no real web framework for go, so the majority of things (web apps that is) written in it are toys (see http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-code).

Most pointedly, there's no compelling structured database story, just a mess. The no-sql solutions like mgo are as good as it gets really. ActiveRecord / SqlAlchemy / NHibernate runs rings around anything that currently exists, and without it, your traditional web apps are pretty difficult to build. You'll find a lot of commentary along those lines from people who've tried.

(...but it turns out a lot of people want tiny little web servers that don't do very much, and serve json. It's great for that~)

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> As the article points out, there's no real web framework for go [...]

Not true at all. As I covered in the "Go 1.1 released" thread[1], there is no "de-facto" web framework, but there are a handful of good ones: web.go, beego & Revel, to start. Think Flask, Sinatra & Django, respectively, in terms of complexity/kitchen sink.

You are right that there is no "great" ORM in the vein of SQLAlchemy/ActiveRecord, but that's partly because: a) the language is young, and b) the language attracts people that don't like the generalisations/performance issues associated with ORMs.

> ...your traditional web apps are pretty difficult to build.

What's a "traditional web app"? A CRUD app in an MVC style? Sure, you won't be able to turn something "big" around in a short amount of time like you can with Django/Rails, but difficult on the opposite end of the spectrum. You can certainly turn around something performant and scalable, and it's unlikely that you will have to strip components out to keep things fast.

You can, however, bolt together a handful of packages (again, see [1]) and go down the Flask-style route, which seems to be becoming more and more popular these days as people eschew the growing complexity of the bigger frameworks.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5702240

All you've pointed out is exactly what I've said; it's fine for small things.

> All you've pointed out is exactly what I've said; it's fine for small things.

Except that's not what I said.

Go can be used for big things on the web. Google uses it for dl.google.com; SoundCloud uses it; amongst many others.

What I am saying is that there isn't a defacto "kitchen sink" framework for Go, but this does not stop large applications from being built.

The same tools for small sites scale nicely to large ones in Go.

Your examples are things that don't use databases.

There's a reason for that.

(and absolutely, yes, for things that don't it's a totally viable solution)

> see http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-code)

Uriel is dead. So don't link to cat-v.org as if it was an up-to-date resource.

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