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I'm always puzzled by these "Blah blah blah, written in Go" posts. Can't you write the same thing in any other language? Most of the time, isn't "Blah blah bl

I'm always puzzled by these "Blah blah blah, written in Go" posts. Can't you write the same thing in any other language? Most of the time, isn't "Blah blah blah" just a Go clone of some tool written in another language anyway? Is Go feature-challenged, or nigh unto impossible to use, thus rendering "Blah blah blah, written in Go" newsworthy? I'm sure this sounds sarcastic and to be fair, it is. Still, I really don't understand the need to constantly tout the fact that it is, indeed, possible to write things using Go. As a community, Hacker News doesn't seem to do this, at least not to the same extent, with any other language. However, if a new developer cracks open a Go book, it seems we have to have a "Hello, World! written in Go" article to go along with it. Does anyone else find that weird?

GrumpyCoder 8y ago
Lightweight and portable come to mind when I see "written in Go". Those qualities are pretty appealing for the self-hosted crowd.
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  I guess that's a possibility; however, Go isn't the most lightweight and portable language out there. Rust and Erlang both seem like better options if those criteria are important.
  - GrumpyCoder 8y ago
    Of course it won't beat Rust or C but it's good enough.
  - wieghant 8y ago
    I just find Go a more pleasant experience. The source code is easily readable and understandable. I don't run into weird wrong version or dependency problems ever. Go get, go build and i'm done. Or if i download the binary, just dump it in a bin folder and it works without even having Go on the system. I haven't written anything in Rust or Erlang yet, but I have run into trouble when building Rust packages from source. Maybe it was the package maintainer's bad every time, the system setup or I'm just dim, but I just need to get stuff done and not go down the rabbit hole. I also personally don't like the hassle with Python version environments.
sl1ck731 8y ago
I don't understand your beef with describing it as a Go project. Most of the common pentesting tools are in Python or Ruby. I've been hoping Go would replace Ruby and Python as the language for security and pentesting tooling, so in that respect I'm happy to see this and hope for more.
SEJeff 8y ago
Portable and trivial to cross compile make go a perfect language for an agent, like a C2 agent and server. This type of app being written in go is a feature. Most red team tools are written in ruby/python/C#/.Net/Powershell.
erik_seaberg 8y ago
On one hand, I'm dismayed at all the résumé-driven development and tedious code that should have been generated from a DSL. On the other, replacing C with Go pretty much anywhere is a step forward.

GrumpyCoder 8y ago

Lightweight and portable come to mind when I see "written in Go". Those qualities are pretty appealing for the self-hosted crowd.

innocentoldguy 8y ago
I guess that's a possibility; however, Go isn't the most lightweight and portable language out there. Rust and Erlang both seem like better options if those criteria are important.
- GrumpyCoder 8y ago
  Of course it won't beat Rust or C but it's good enough.
- wieghant 8y ago
  I just find Go a more pleasant experience. The source code is easily readable and understandable. I don't run into weird wrong version or dependency problems ever. Go get, go build and i'm done. Or if i download the binary, just dump it in a bin folder and it works without even having Go on the system. I haven't written anything in Rust or Erlang yet, but I have run into trouble when building Rust packages from source. Maybe it was the package maintainer's bad every time, the system setup or I'm just dim, but I just need to get stuff done and not go down the rabbit hole. I also personally don't like the hassle with Python version environments.

sl1ck731 8y ago

I don't understand your beef with describing it as a Go project. Most of the common pentesting tools are in Python or Ruby. I've been hoping Go would replace Ruby and Python as the language for security and pentesting tooling, so in that respect I'm happy to see this and hope for more.

SEJeff 8y ago

Portable and trivial to cross compile make go a perfect language for an agent, like a C2 agent and server. This type of app being written in go is a feature. Most red team tools are written in ruby/python/C#/.Net/Powershell.

erik_seaberg 8y ago

On one hand, I'm dismayed at all the résumé-driven development and tedious code that should have been generated from a DSL. On the other, replacing C with Go pretty much anywhere is a step forward.