Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

Go seems to be hitting some kind of tipping point where it's going from being more of a niche thing with a small user base to something with a broader appeal. I don't think that it's because go is changing so much as the kinds of problems people are encountering writing web services that need to scale (or at least have that option).

I've been comparing go to scala lately and what has really got me into go is the development speed. The fast compiles and fast web page auto-reload make it feel every bit as fast to develop in as ruby or python or php, but with type safety, fewer tests, and very clean code.

Scala is a fantastic language, but even with jrebel autoreload you still have 2-3 second page reloads and a 5 second test suite reload. That seems like a small thing, but the faster I see code change results, the more hooked I am to the process. A 5 second wait is probably enough to get me out of the zone.

With go, on just a default simple test of a small thing it is less than a second to compile/run. In revel, pages reload/update as fast/faster than they do in rails/sinatra.

Oh, and with go, each web request will run in a separate goroutine, so you get excellent nonblocking IO performance without dealing with the callback soup of node.js.

It might just be irrational exuberance because I haven't built anything big and messy yet, but so far go is seriously fantastic and solves a lot of real world problems elegantly.

Oh, painful point, I still try to ignore Scala's compile time and hope it will improve in the future, (it does gradually on every release) but when I do, then Scala feels a bit more natural to me than Go (it feels closer to Ruby for me, which I like, and has the Java interop aspect, which I unfortunately need). I just close my eyes, do sbt ~test-quick, and hope for the best. It's just that Scala feels to me more like a statically typed Ruby, where in Go I need to shift some paradigms and do some mental twists to accept how great it is.

Their philosophies are so different, though. Mostly the only thing they have in common is being "modern" in their own ways.

A long tipping point, but one indeed.

So you've enjoyed all the marketing and Google employee upvoting?

So you ignored the part where the OP described having actually used it in development and liking it?

I think we need more than 1 account of Go in production before we start high-fiving each other about Go in the mainstream.

And to be fair to the person you are responding too, there has been an inordinate amount of Go articles on HN over the last few months compared to anywhere else on the internet tech/dev wise, so much so that a number of my friends have independently made a joke of it.

There are plenty accounts of Go in production: (Google's dl.google.com) https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/BNUNbKSypE0/E4qS..., (CloudFlare's Railgun) http://blog.cloudflare.com/go-at-cloudflare, (Bit.ly) http://word.bitly.com/post/29550171827/go-go-gadget, (SoundCloud) http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/07/go-at-soundcloud/, (Disqus's realtime-backend) http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-t..., etc

>I think we need more than 1 account of Go in production before we start high-fiving each other about Go in the mainstream.

I've been programming in Go full time since Go 1.0. Lots of companies use Go: http://golang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go -And that is list out of date and not maintained. For example, companies like Mozilla and Walmart are not on that out of date list.

agreed - we've been using Go in production since before 1.0 and I know of many other high profile companies using it that aren't publicizing their usage for whatever reason. There is no question of whether Go works in production under loads. That has been asked and answered, your honor.

> I think we need more than 1 account of Go in production before we start high-fiving each other about Go in the mainstream.

http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/GoUsers

http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/SuccessStories

Just sayin'.

Definitely nice lists, and nowhere near complete given the data we've collected.

HN and /r/programming both have waves of fetishes. Before Go, it was Node. Before Node, Haskell. Before Haskell, Common Lisp.

> there has been an inordinate amount of Go articles on HN over the last few months They are being submitted and voted up by people. If you want other content, then create / upvote it, just don't pretend 'inordinate' means anything in this kind of context.

Comments like this never, ever improve threads.

The other thing that never improves threads is everyone only posting what they think might get upvoted instead of saying what they actually think, especially when there might be a grain of truth in it. Tedious comment back-patting is the death of good communities.

How about we avoid both trollish sarcasm and tedious back-patting, and say what we really think politely? That's not so hard.

Everyone's gotta cool it with that meta-modding too. I'm sick of scrolling through tons of knight-in-shining-armor comments to get to the actual discussion tucked at the bottom of the page.

Yes they do. I learned that there are lots of places using golang in production, without even having to ask.

I think you misread my comment.

As much as you've enjoyed the "GENERICS OR BUST" and anti-Google, downvoting crowds.

Yes, it's all a conspiracy! Because that's how open source development at Google work: create shitty technology, spam HN, Reddit et al. with it, and then let the massive Google workforce and the fanboys upvote the postings.

/s

3. Profit

Have you paid for your annual Go compiler license subscription yet? Yeah, me neither.

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