Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by personZ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The only really innovative parts of Go are its concurrency support, which Swift seems to be completely lacking.

Worth noting that one of the greatest problems in software development is concurrency support and its ease of use/robustness.

It is a critical and growing issue.

In contrast, having or not having generics, optionals (in C# these are nullable types), algebraic data types (which in Go is interface, albiet minus the type set checking) make a marginal, vanishingly small difference in programmer productivity or application performance/stability.

99% of the articles about the profound importance of generics are people building nothing of interest for anyone, and it is exactly that vaguery of design that makes generics seem so important.

Concurrency, however, is everyone's problem. It is the modern programming problem. Nothing is more important.

And FWIW, all languages draw from each other, and of course they should learn from each other. It is very likely that Go influenced Swift in subtle ways, but it is obvious why that wouldn't be referenced.

> 99% of the articles about the profound importance of generics are people building nothing of interest for anyone, and it is exactly that vaguery of design that makes generics seem so important.

I think it's quite a stretch to say that people who have written articles about generics are almost never building anything of importance. The browser you used to post this comment makes extensive use of generics via C++ templates, which were well documented by their authors in order to fill a very important role (smart pointers for reference counted objects, for one).

I think it's quite a stretch to say that people who have written articles about generics

I said 99%. The vast majority of language observations online are language tourists, and the observations are seldom practical or rational, but instead are of the "in kicking the tires and making nothing in practical, here are my thoughts".

Those sorts of posts dominate.

Generics have a place, but their importance is...overstated. Though I would quite broadly disagree with the notion that auto_ptr -- a shim on C++ -- justifies the notion of generics.

People don't write articles discussing how their whole complex project works because it would take too long. those articles are written to highlight what and how these features have improved their ability to make software efficiently/reduce errors etc.

I do not agree that the importance of generics is overrated and it's one of the primary reasons I won't be using Go. I need to know what type of object I'm working with to feel comfortable when programming, and I like the reassurance from the compiler that it agrees with me that that is actually what I'm working with. I would really like Go if it had generics, but it's just too unsafe for me to use in its current form.

Well, I have written big projects in other languages, and I wouldn't go back to a language without generics.

Don't know where you got the arbitrary "99%" statistic from.

It's not like generics are some novel, marginal concept. It's 2014 already.

Genuine question: what does Go provide in terms of concurrency that Swift + GCD doesn't?

I would argue that Go has it more "baked in."

But I'm actually curious as well. Given that Objective-C (and now Swift) have GCD, what language features are needed to bring concurrency up to par with Go?

I'm sort of reminded of what Microsoft did after Task Parallel Library came out with C#. People didn't pay attention too much to what MS was building until async/await came out (along with tooling support). But async/await built upon TPL. So it's probably a matter of time for Apple to do something similar on top of GCD, if they're going to do something. But I doubt it's going to look something like Go.

Go provides straight-ahead, blocking-is-OK concurrency. GCD provides callback-based concurrency, like node.js, but with several worker threads instead of just one.

Apple already has GCD/libdispatch, and is presumably content to continue handling this with libraries, at least for now. Concurrency's certainly important, but I don't think it's entirely clear yet that _language level support_ for it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com