Why Go?

mikeperham.com

16 pointsmperham4 comments

To summarize: the author considered both Rust and Go and chose Go because Rust wasn't done yet. After using Go for a while, he found he liked the usual suspects.

I think a compare/contrast of even a few features would have been nice.

Go still has no good IDE support, no interactive debugger. I don't know why people prefer Go over the alternative like Scala+Akka.

(full disclosure: I'm seasoned with Go and haven't used Scala past playing with it in a REPL)

I would argue that Go is far more readable, and simpler to grok, than Scala, and that's without adding Akka on top of it. That's with respect to the level of this project - how much it does, and what it's doing. If you have a huge, distributed system project, I'm sure there's a lot of things Scala would make easier over Go's rabid simplicity.

You're also ignoring the points he made WRT portability and dependencies. Scala/Akka still need the JVM, and potentially a bunch of other dependencies.

When all you have is a ..., everything looks like a ..., and what not.

If you're writing server side code, then there is nothing wrong with relying on the JVM. High performance, self optimized over time can easily make up for the long startup time, and high memory usage.

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