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> your inconsistent error passing has me somewhat confused.

That was my first somewhat big program in Go plus coming from Python made a bit of hustle here. I still believe exceptions to be much better than this error-returning. :\ Never learned to do it nicely. :\

> Overall, I'd say Go is an effective language. But not beautiful, or novel in the slightest.

Yes, this is more or less my feelings nowadays. It's good for certain cases and if I ever need something fast, I'll use Go and not C.

> I'm not sure I see the appeal.

There is some. It's still much simpler than C (GC + stricter compiler), plus it has goroutines (not much in this app, though), plus interfaces are really wonderful (you don't need to declare that you implement interface, just implement it and you're done).

On C. C has been around for _much_ longer than Go, and a lot of people understand C inside out. The C ecosystem is fantastic: there are extremely good implementations of virtually everything that you can use to build a production-grade application.

On Go. It'll take time for a programmer to fully understand how to use a new language, and it'll be a long time before great implementations appear. If the language isn't that much of an improvement, why will an existing C programmer take the effort to learn it? Aren't the returns diminishing? Computers will only get faster, llvm will only improve (tooling + compile time + link time): in that respect, doesn't Go seem a bit short-sighted?

And there is a whole lot of people who don't know C inside out and don't want to dive in it.

One needs to explicitly manage memory, deal with raw pointers, ugly header files and all that stuff. No interfaces, too.

In the respect of existing C programmers, maybe. Having myself never mastered C because of its complexity, in a few months part-time effort starting from getting a book on Go I built a sophisticated website. In the respect of non-C programmers, Go is extremely useful.

C isn't any more difficult to understand, IMO. Obviously Go has the advantage of hindsight and an opportunity to go back on the trade-offs that were made for compiler efficiency before C was standardized. However, at it's core I think C is much more simple than Go and theoretically should be easier to understand.

I find GC to be a useful tool but have you ever looked into the implementation of one? Or have you run into a situation where it was necessary to reason about the performance characteristics of a GC in relation to some algorithm or tight main loop?

I don't find C's lack of GC any more complex than GC. In fact I find it much more simple. It requires more discipline on the part of the programmer (and perhaps that is where the appeal of a GC comes from). Perhaps it's because I started programming with addressing memory and building up a mental model of how it works and have only encountered GC as a useful addition to my programming toolbox (instead of an always-present assumption).

As well, co-routine trampolining (which is what I assume the playful pun go-routines are referring to... please correct me if I am wrong) isn't a very "simple" thing to understand either. At least they are not any more simple than threads so I don't understand how they make learning Go any more easy for non-C programmers (except perhaps exposure to co-routines in a language that already has them like Python).

I guess what I am saying is that you could have just as easily mastered as much C in those few months as you did Go.

I believe the goroutines are cooperative, yielded either explicitly or by calling various library functions. So you don't need quite the same sort of locking as you do with preemptively-multitasked threads, and there's also a much larger set of atomic operations. This should make things much easier...

I think some people's intellects are more suited to learning and mastering C, which is great for the development of major products. For general business applications development and websites I think C may be overkill compared to Go. In a test of 2K concurrent users hitting my website on a cheap box, each served a unique page, all users are served fast, so I'm glad that Go is handling GC instead of me. I've done multi-threaded code in C# and find goroutines much simpler.

I have goroutines referencing objects created in other goroutines. It seems to do my own GC without becoming too unwieldy I'd have to write something like the generic GC code Go already has built-in. It was nice to not have to think about that at all and still get great performance.

I would argue that C is probably the easiest language to understand, if you know the basics of hardware. C is essentially portable assembly. The C standard is tiny, and the behaviors are very clearly defined. The challenge is not in understanding the language, but rather in honing the engineering discipline required to use it to write real-world programs.

It lacks a garbage collector because there was no concept of garbage collector when the language was created. A C program does not provide enough information for a good garbage collector: the best we can do is a conservative garbage collector, Boehm. The garbage collector adds to the running-cost to the program for the promise of automatic memory management. While the GC might run concurrently, any sort of relocation (for compacting) will require it to pause the entire program: these GC pauses can be fatal if your program is the Linux kernel or some high-frequency trading application. Even otherwise, it is important to remember that every GC introduces trade-offs; the "freedom" from manual memory management is only worth it if your GC is good.

When I'm not writing C, I like writing Ruby. I like that it's a beautiful evolving language packed with features. And for the little applications I'm writing, I don't care even if it takes a second longer. I like that I'm not being verbose about anything, and not manually managing memory. Writing something like Jekyll in C would be an absolute pain in the arse, and totally not worth it. Obviously, the lesson is: use the right tool for the right job.

The pthreads API can certainly be very intimidating, and it requires a lot of practice to master threading in C. I like that Go has taken the concept of coroutines from Lisp (Scheme's call/cc) and turned it into something called Gorountines in imperative land. Although it's nothing novel, I won't deny that it's a nice abstraction to work with while doing multi-threaded programming.

If we were to redo C from scratch today, I'd definitely bake in more safety features. Probably design a close garbage collected dialect. For better or worse, that's an entirely theoretical scenario: we have Go today, but I'm not sure where exactly it fits in:

1. It obviously can't replace C in linux, git, zlib, ssh, openssl, libcurl, nginx, varnish, or anything as core.

2. Since it doesn't have generics or any higher OO features, it can't displace C++ in chrome or llvm.

3. When python, ruby, javascript are around, why will anyone want to use a strongly typed language for writing web applications? Okay, maybe some intensive web services like search.

Tools? The most popular Go repositories on GitHub are dotcloud/docker (software deployment tool), burke/zeus (Rails preloader) and ha/doozerd (a very specific kind of datastore).

Might be useful in Android development, but is everyone's stuck in a Dalvik swamp there.

> When python, ruby, javascript are around, why will anyone want to use a strongly typed language for writing web applications?

Because Go is multiples faster at runtime! After using Go I lost interest in learning Python, which seems only slightly easier to code in.

> Writing something like Jekyll in C would be an absolute pain in the arse, and totally not worth it.

Well, here you go: https://github.com/piranha/gostatic

Wasn't pain in the ass, wasn't hard, works so much faster than Jekyll (or my previous engine, cyrax, which was in Python), that it's even funny.

>Overall, I'd say Go is an effective language. But not beautiful, or novel in the slightest

You are right on target. Go was designed to be boring[1][2]. Programming language should not be about tricks and traps. It's a tool. Tools are not built for beauty. They are built for functionality.

[1]http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article [2]http://aeronotix.pl/blog/go-is-boring

In [1](2.Introudction) even the inventors agree that Go can be boring to some people. Guess what, It's boring by design.

and proudly declares that it will not use any modern advances to compiler technology

Where do they say anything of the kind?

Your last paragraph contains some spurious statements:

"proudly declares that it will not use any modern advances to compiler technology"

Where? I've read most of the available documentation, blog-posts etc. and have yet to come across a statement even vaguely resembling this.

"what the final program looks like is secondary concern"

Have you read about "go fmt"? The entire idea of it is to format the code to a standard. You don't need to use it, but it's recommended and, frankly, makes every other language without a similar feature seem like "what the final program looks like is secondary concern".

You're welcome to your opinion, but I think you'd best do some more research before making such statements without references.

> proudly declares that it will not use any modern advances to compiler technology

My apologies: this is an opinion, rather than an explicit declaration from the project. Their compiler "gc" starts with a traditional recursive descent parser using bison, and chose not to use llvm. Although one can argue that llvm doesn't provide enough information to implement a great jit, all aot compilers are moving towards using it. By having a common compiler infrastructure, compilers can focus on what is important. They currently have a simple parallel mark-and-sweep garbage collector, and there is some scope for development in the context of concurrent programs (wasn't it their goal to make it easy to write concurrent programs with goroutines?). Nothing spectacular though: the garbage collector in a mature JVM or V8 (which has to deal with a weakly typed language!) is far ahead; that's where the garbage collection research happens.

> what the final programs looks like is secondary concern

The grammar has been specifically engineered so that the language can be analyzed and parsed without a symbol table. "go fmt" is just syntactical sugar: you cannot change the underlying parser. I'm not bikeshedding about which syntax is "better", but pointing out the motivation behind the current syntax. For instance, it's very different from ruby, which was designed ground-up to resemble human language as closely as possible (hence Poignant Ruby etc).

[edit: gc does not use a gcc backend; gccgo does]

The gc compiler does not use a gcc backend. You're confusing it with gccgo. The llgo project is working on an llvm-based Go compiler.

Right, gccgo. However, that does seem to be the dominant implementation: llgo is being developed as an education exercise (excerpt from project page). From the Go FAQ:

We also considered using LLVM for gc but we felt it was too large and slow to meet our performance goals.

The 'dominant' implementation is gc, not gccgo. IIRC, gc is based off the Plan 9 compliers which Pike et al write. gccgo is an alternative implementation which (generally) trails gc.

Most go programs that don't need to be linked with existing C libraries are using the gc compiler.

Currently there are a lot of really good C libraries that haven't been ported to go, so anyone who wants to link to those is using the gccgo compiler, but it will probably be less used as the native 3rd party libraries catch up, or the C libraries are ported (this is happening at a furious rate)

No need to apologise to me :-) As I said, you're entitled to your opinion.

You'll probably be interested in some of what was talked about in the "Go Fireside Chat" (http://youtu.be/p9VUCp98ay4) in regards to re-designing the compiler, alternate compilers, LLVM etc. It sounds like they're aware of exactly the issues you're concerned about.

Although one can argue that llvm doesn't provide enough information to implement a great jit, all aot compilers are moving towards using it.

Actually, all serious Common Lisp implementations, for example, do incremental AOT compilation these days, and none of them is ever going to "move towards using LLVM". In the broader landscape of programming language implementations, as far as IR generality is concerned, LLVM is actually not significantly better than Java bytecode, and for many languages, trying to use it would probably generate more problems than actually using it would solve.