3 ms·

Six years for language stability is nothing compared to, for example, C89.

skybrian 9y ago
But for a fair comparison you'd need to include a lot of C libraries to match Go's standard library. How much have those libraries changed over the years?
- brandur 9y ago
  (I wrote TFA.) > But for a fair comparison you'd need to include a lot of C libraries to match Go's standard library. How much have those libraries changed over the years? Yes, exactly. Something like C isn't a fair comparison because there's so little included in the core language. Think about everything that you get with Go's standard library: concurrency, HTTP (even HTTP2), TLS, JSON, XML, Zip encoding, Regexp, etc., and then consider C's APIs along with all the APIs of all the libraries you'd need in C to accomplish those tasks — all of that together would be a more fair comparison. That might seem like apples and oranges, but for most real-world programs, people generally need a considerable subset of that functionality. C's stability is nothing to scoff at, but it's nowhere near as impressive of an achievement.
  - slaymaker1907 9y ago
    A fairer comparison might be python3. Even if you assume python has only been stable since python3, it is still older than Golang since Go came out in 2009 and python 3.0 was released in 2008.
TheDong 9y ago
The "Go is one of the most actively developed projects in the world" line is also complete bullshit; almost every other popular project (from rust to openstack to k8s to docker to chromium to linux .. etc) has an order of magnitude more development effort happening by most metrics, including commit rate. This reads like someone who hasn't looked outside the walled garden of Go very often.
- brandur 9y ago
  > The "Go is one of the most actively developed projects in the world" line is also complete bullshit; I think this is a pretty uncharitable interpretation of what I said. I didn't say "the most", but rather "one of the most". Kubernetes, Docker, and Chromium are all huge projects with similar or higher commit rates, but think about the other 99.99% of other open-source projects. In comparison to them, anything of Go's scale is huge. Try not to focus on the individual wording though. If you like, just read it as "a very active project".
flavio81 9y ago
Or Common Lisp (same language since 1994, and almost identical in 1984; still modern.)

But for a fair comparison you'd need to include a lot of C libraries to match Go's standard library. How much have those libraries changed over the years?

brandur 9y ago
(I wrote TFA.) > But for a fair comparison you'd need to include a lot of C libraries to match Go's standard library. How much have those libraries changed over the years? Yes, exactly. Something like C isn't a fair comparison because there's so little included in the core language. Think about everything that you get with Go's standard library: concurrency, HTTP (even HTTP2), TLS, JSON, XML, Zip encoding, Regexp, etc., and then consider C's APIs along with all the APIs of all the libraries you'd need in C to accomplish those tasks — all of that together would be a more fair comparison. That might seem like apples and oranges, but for most real-world programs, people generally need a considerable subset of that functionality. C's stability is nothing to scoff at, but it's nowhere near as impressive of an achievement.
- slaymaker1907 9y ago
  A fairer comparison might be python3. Even if you assume python has only been stable since python3, it is still older than Golang since Go came out in 2009 and python 3.0 was released in 2008.

TheDong 9y ago

The "Go is one of the most actively developed projects in the world" line is also complete bullshit; almost every other popular project (from rust to openstack to k8s to docker to chromium to linux .. etc) has an order of magnitude more development effort happening by most metrics, including commit rate. This reads like someone who hasn't looked outside the walled garden of Go very often.

brandur 9y ago
> The "Go is one of the most actively developed projects in the world" line is also complete bullshit; I think this is a pretty uncharitable interpretation of what I said. I didn't say "the most", but rather "one of the most". Kubernetes, Docker, and Chromium are all huge projects with similar or higher commit rates, but think about the other 99.99% of other open-source projects. In comparison to them, anything of Go's scale is huge. Try not to focus on the individual wording though. If you like, just read it as "a very active project".

flavio81 9y ago

Or Common Lisp (same language since 1994, and almost identical in 1984; still modern.)