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Comment by cgag | Hacker News Reader

What's the niche Go occupies and what makes go better than those other languages you mentioned for that niche?

Those languages are better tools for solving problems in a lot of cases, the problem is people just choose tools that are similar to ones they already know rather than the best tools available.

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You don't even know what kind of project I'm talking about and you are saying "rather than the best tools available"? I don't get it. Do you really believe that problem field doesn't matter, and FP is "best tools available by default" for any field anyway?

Go to github and see the rank of project written in Go, you will see clearly what is the niche market(not that niche I would say) I'm talking about.

Writing servers is a pretty big niche, don't you think?

That niche seems to be web servers, which is a gigantic niche, but yes I largely think its a worse tool than Haskell/Ocaml/Erlang/etc in that niche.

The point stcredzero about manually laying out memory is fair, though much less important in writing web servers than in a game.

I ported a game server from Clojure to Go. Go was simply a better fit. When you need to make sure that memory in structs is laid out a certain way to avoid cache line clobbering with high parallelism and ensure arithmetic is using 64 bit ints, Go does this more easily. It would have the same advantages over Scala. Not sure about Haskell or OCaml. (Suspect not.)

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