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Comment by nearestneighbor | Hacker News Reader

AT FIRST GLANCE:

Annoyances: braces; variable declarations more verbose than in C

Flaws: no discriminated unions; no generics or parametric polymorphism

Doubts: no exceptions; no macros (as far as I can tell)

    Edit: I take back the verbosity claim. := does inference
    Edit2: interfaces replace generics, but are 
        type-checked at runtime, apparently:
        http://golang.org/doc/go_for_cpp_programmers.html#Interfaces

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No macros indeed. Unions types will probably happen sooner rather than later.

No macros is pretty annoying, but note the package go/ast and go/parser; they include in the standard library a parser for the language, which should make writing tools operating on Go significantly easier.

Yeah. Languages with no control flow other than "call" and "return" were ok for the 80s... but we know better now. Just add continuations and you get functions, coroutines, exceptions, loop exits ("last", "next", etc.), and so on for free.

I am not sure why I'd use this language with no libraries when I could use a better-designed language with no libraries instead.

It ain't CPAN yet, but I think "no libraries" is an over-statement: http://golang.org/pkg/

There are other control flow options available. For example they offer the following simple example of what they call goroutines:

    ch := make(chan int);
    go sum(hugeArray, ch);
    // ... do something else for a while
    result := <-ch;  // wait for, and retrieve, result

You can actually set up any complex mess you want of functions talking to other functions through channels. This gives you coroutines, threading, etc. Looking through the spec, it looks like they have anonymous functions and closures as well.

While I agree that they need to add exceptions, they do have some interesting things in there already.

On Edit2: interfaces don't replace generics, they're more like a strong duck-typing system (if that makes any sense).

Generics are being worked on (according to the tech talk), but they haven't determined the best way to do them yet.

Exceptions are definitely needed.

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