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What is it being used for? HTTP servers? 7 years without proper penetration into the GUI market seems odd, unless it is aimed elsewhere?

vram22 10y ago
>What is it being used for? HTTP servers? Yes, that is one big area - networked servers - a superset of HTTP servers. The Google site that serves the Chrome browser is supposed to be a Go app, and I've read Google uses Go a lot internally. (I'm sure Rob Pike and his team must be using it, after developing it for that very purpose.) Reading up on the goals of Go will give some insight into that. Part of the reason was that they wanted it to write big systems at Google, including networked ones, and wanted a better experience than they had with C++ (build times [1] and also other issues). Rob Pike has written some about it, others may have too). [1] This video that I blogged about: Video: C++, Rust, D and Go: Panel at LangNext '14: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/08/video-c-rust-d-and-go-panel-at-langnext.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/08/video-c-rust-d-and-go-pane... has many interesting language-related discussions; one of them is the discussion about the build times of C++ vs. those of more modern language. There are concrete reasons why C++ build times are relatively so large - the use of include files is part of the reason - those are discussed some in the video, between the panelists, including some of the language (co-)inventors, such as C++'s Bjarne Stroustrup, Go's Rob Pike and D's Walter Bright. There is a nice moment or two near the end where Stroustrup responds about C++ build times - okay, won't spoil it for you and others - go see it :) Command-line tools is another area where Go is used a lot. Getting the convenience of deploying a simple single binary (maybe at the most a config file or two with it) even by just copying to the deploy target - unlike what you have to do with interpreted languages like Python and Ruby (unless you use something like PyInstaller or py2exe for Python, but that is not officially supported and may or not work for all Python apps [2]). This gives us back some of the convenience of older compiled languages like C where this was the normal way of deploying - but with some benefits over languages such as C (see Go vs. C topics), plus goroutines, channels, etc., I guess. Though I have not come across any examples of what things command line apps using goroutines and channels could be used for - it would be interesting to hear/read about some. I mean apart from a few somewhat obvious ones such as a web client to download multiple URLs in different goroutines, concurrently. [2] I've tried out PyInstaller on a few Python apps, including command-line apps, and a simple wxPython app or two - it did work okay for those, in the limited testing I did. Edit: fixed typos, added a few points.
Matthias247 10y ago
IMHO Go is a good choice for lots of system daemons and commandline tools. If networking is involved it shines even more. > 7 years without proper penetration into the GUI market seems odd, unless it is aimed elsewhere? You could apply this criticism to nearly all languags, as there are currently only very few that are used for native GUIs: C and C++, because the operating systems and native toolkits are written in that, C# for Windows (Winforms and WPF) and Java for cross-plattform GUI applications.
- aikah 10y ago
  Python has strong support for Gnome libraries, therefore GTK+ through GObject introspection. Go type system is too rigid to allow a tool like GObject introspection to interact with Go code. So no, this criticism doesn't apply to nearly all languages.
  - Matthias247 10y ago
    Might be true that Python has some advantages in wrapping GTK+ or even QT. But the parent mentioned "proper penetration of the GUI market". And I think also for Python the amount of GUI applications is quite low.
- dilap 10y ago
  objc is a huge one! most iphone apps. increasingly, swift too. there's some python stuff. the original bittorrent client. i did a couple apps using PyQt and python -- not an experience i would want to repeat, though.
  - Matthias247 10y ago
    Yeah, objc is. However mentally I counted that towards the OS languages and C family languages. Swift also belongs to the OS (first class langauge) category, although it's certainly not in the C family. For others maybe Delphi was succesful in the GUI domain. But in the last years it was certainly not often mentioned. For GTK there's also Vala, which was probably even designed to be used for GUIs.

vram22 10y ago

>What is it being used for? HTTP servers? Yes, that is one big area - networked servers - a superset of HTTP servers. The Google site that serves the Chrome browser is supposed to be a Go app, and I've read Google uses Go a lot internally. (I'm sure Rob Pike and his team must be using it, after developing it for that very purpose.) Reading up on the goals of Go will give some insight into that. Part of the reason was that they wanted it to write big systems at Google, including networked ones, and wanted a better experience than they had with C++ (build times [1] and also other issues). Rob Pike has written some about it, others may have too). [1] This video that I blogged about: Video: C++, Rust, D and Go: Panel at LangNext '14: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/08/video-c-rust-d-and-go-panel-at-langnext.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2016/08/video-c-rust-d-and-go-pane... has many interesting language-related discussions; one of them is the discussion about the build times of C++ vs. those of more modern language. There are concrete reasons why C++ build times are relatively so large - the use of include files is part of the reason - those are discussed some in the video, between the panelists, including some of the language (co-)inventors, such as C++'s Bjarne Stroustrup, Go's Rob Pike and D's Walter Bright. There is a nice moment or two near the end where Stroustrup responds about C++ build times - okay, won't spoil it for you and others - go see it :) Command-line tools is another area where Go is used a lot. Getting the convenience of deploying a simple single binary (maybe at the most a config file or two with it) even by just copying to the deploy target - unlike what you have to do with interpreted languages like Python and Ruby (unless you use something like PyInstaller or py2exe for Python, but that is not officially supported and may or not work for all Python apps [2]). This gives us back some of the convenience of older compiled languages like C where this was the normal way of deploying - but with some benefits over languages such as C (see Go vs. C topics), plus goroutines, channels, etc., I guess. Though I have not come across any examples of what things command line apps using goroutines and channels could be used for - it would be interesting to hear/read about some. I mean apart from a few somewhat obvious ones such as a web client to download multiple URLs in different goroutines, concurrently. [2] I've tried out PyInstaller on a few Python apps, including command-line apps, and a simple wxPython app or two - it did work okay for those, in the limited testing I did. Edit: fixed typos, added a few points.

Matthias247 10y ago

IMHO Go is a good choice for lots of system daemons and commandline tools. If networking is involved it shines even more. > 7 years without proper penetration into the GUI market seems odd, unless it is aimed elsewhere? You could apply this criticism to nearly all languags, as there are currently only very few that are used for native GUIs: C and C++, because the operating systems and native toolkits are written in that, C# for Windows (Winforms and WPF) and Java for cross-plattform GUI applications.

aikah 10y ago
Python has strong support for Gnome libraries, therefore GTK+ through GObject introspection. Go type system is too rigid to allow a tool like GObject introspection to interact with Go code. So no, this criticism doesn't apply to nearly all languages.
- Matthias247 10y ago
  Might be true that Python has some advantages in wrapping GTK+ or even QT. But the parent mentioned "proper penetration of the GUI market". And I think also for Python the amount of GUI applications is quite low.
dilap 10y ago
objc is a huge one! most iphone apps. increasingly, swift too. there's some python stuff. the original bittorrent client. i did a couple apps using PyQt and python -- not an experience i would want to repeat, though.
- Matthias247 10y ago
  Yeah, objc is. However mentally I counted that towards the OS languages and C family languages. Swift also belongs to the OS (first class langauge) category, although it's certainly not in the C family. For others maybe Delphi was succesful in the GUI domain. But in the last years it was certainly not often mentioned. For GTK there's also Vala, which was probably even designed to be used for GUIs.