7 ms·

> large scale collaboration What does golang have to facilitate large scale collaboration that isn't done better in languages such as Java or C#?

by apta 7y ago

tsimionescu 7y ago
Even more, what does Go have better in terms of dev tooling than Java or C#?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vips7L 7y ago
  It doesn't.
  - helvetica2020 7y ago
    Comparing Go to the JVM for dev tooling not to mention the operational ecosystem is a bit silly. JVM is miles ahead.
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  Go fmt Code formatters are available in Java/C# but not ones that have a default set in stone.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mohaine 7y ago
    Ditto for logging framework, unit test framework, base http framework...
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      Those are not dev tools, they are libraries. Also, even though there is no default built in unit test framework in Java and C#, it would be hard to claim JUnit and NUnit aren't essentially that. Ditto for log4j in Java. By the way, I'm not sure you can claim to have a logging framework in your language when it can't even differentiate between debug messages, info and error messages. I'm not sure there is any significant project that can rely on Go log that couldn't as easily use stderr/stdout.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Ok. But you get to stop discussing some style choices, and instead you lose a decent debugger, a decent (open source) IDE, any graphical profiler, good package management that is separate from your source control tool, and probably a few others I'm missing. And if you care about style trivialities ,you'll still need an external linter, since go fmt doesn't enforce anything about variable names , line length, function length, comment placement, line breaking and many other things some people like to obsess over.
    - andreygrehov 7y ago
      The beauty of Go is that it's so simple that you don't need a debugger. Do you need a word dictionary to read this comment? No, because this comment is simple. Same with Go. But if you need a debugger, there is Delve [1], though I only used it once to debug a dynamic programming algorithm. [1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve https://github.com/go-delve/delve
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        I know about delve, but it's an extremely basic debugger. You can't even pause program execution on demand or execute an arbitrary function while stopped at a breakpoint. Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger. If you are writing a complex program, you sometimes need a debugger to quickly figure out what is going wrong, instead of endless theory -> change/log -> rerun cycles.
        andreygrehov 7y ago
        > Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger I disagree. There is a higher chance you need a debugger when trying to understand, say, Scala code versus Go. > If you are writing a complex program [...] Complexity of a program depends on its author. Even a stupid simple function can get complex if the programmer is less experienced. Go has a philosophy to simplify things. The community tries to follow this philosophy as much as possible, which is why a lot of Go code is easy to read regardless of how complex the logic is. In the majority of cases, a need for Go debugger means you are dealing with bad written code. Heck, this idea can be extended to pretty much any language.
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    I wish there was Go's code diagram creation tool called "go figure."
- Kaze404 7y ago
  Considering Go's tooling ecosystem is split in half (supports modules / doesn't support modules), nothing really.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    To be fair, all languages that have not had modules built in suffer from this to some extent or another. The main good part about Java is that they have compatibility between code using modules and code that doesn't.
- closeparen 7y ago
  - Native build system - Auto-formatting - Good first-party testing and benchmarking - Ppprof runs circles around VisualVM All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great. On a meta level, combination of the AST package and deterministic code formatting means it's relatively easy to write programs that manipulate source code.
  - vips7L 7y ago
    Just a nit, Java Microbenchmark Harness is apart of OpenJDK so it is "first-party".
    - closeparen 7y ago
      Oh good point. We're on Java 8 and migrating to 11...
      - vips7L 7y ago
        I've been enjoying the standard library improvements in 11. The http and websocket clients are pretty easy to use.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    > All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great. It's great if you're just starting out, but it's irrelevant in the long run. It can even be harmful when it's coupled with the language, as you get things like having the packaging tool become deprecated, like with go dep, since a 3rd party tool can't compete with a first party tool for adoption, especially in a relatively young language like Go. For pprof vs VisualVM - I haven't yet done a lot of CPU profiling with them, but for memory I have had the exact opposite experience. VisualVM and Eclipse MAT are much easier to understand and have much more functionality for analyzing the memory of a Java process than pprof offers. Not sure what (pseudo-)deterministic code formatting has to do with the ease of manipulating program code, but having a built-in AST package is indeed a good idea. Too bad it hasn't been used to write any useful refactoring tools for Go (outside of JetBrains Goland? Haven't tried that yet). I have heard that Google uses go fix recipes to make modifications across their code base, but haven't seen any examples, and I doubt it can realistically be done in a code base that is not ridiculously well tested, and that it didn't require any manual intervention in a few corner cases in Google as well (assuming they did more than a rename).
tmountain 7y ago
Not a Golang expert or zealot, but a few things come to mind that make it suited for large scale projects and collaboration: 1) Extremely fast build times (even for large codebases). 2) The package system plugs directly into Git/Github. The second reduces friction for distributed/large teams to share packages with a lower administrative burden. I can't compare to modern Java/C# because I haven't used either for quite some time.
- apta 7y ago
  > 1) Extremely fast build times (even for large codebases). Not much faster than C# or Java in practice, especially when using a build system that caches your build so you don't have to rebuild everything every time. The difference actually gets smaller the larger the program is. Furthermore, it's (unit/functional/integration) tests that usually take the longer time to run anyway, which you have to execute before submitting your diffs (and caching helps there as well). > 2) The package system plugs directly into Git/Github. This doesn't suite everyone, as not all projects are open source. > with a lower administrative burden. Any serious company is not going to (1) allow arbitrary code to be pulled from github/etc. and (2) needs to maintain a local repository of it anyway in case github/maven/etc. goes down.
  - sagichmal 7y ago
    > Not much faster than C# or Java in practice Go compile times are pretty inarguably faster than these in practice, yes.
    - apta 7y ago
      Seems like you haven't worked with actual large scale golang code bases then.
      - hu3 7y ago
        I have. Both C# and Go 500k+ LOC codebases. Compilation time between them is a magnitude apart it's not even arguable.
mxschumacher 7y ago
The simplicity of the language means no gigantic class hierarchies. Theres are fewer ways to do something. Since engineers spend most of their time reading and debugging, readability and low abstractions facilitate collaboration: it should be relatively straightforward to jump into any Go codebase. People often laud the relative ease of picking up the language. They're productive quickly, that's not by accident.
- zerr 7y ago
  It doesn't restrict gigantic hierarchies per se, just the compiler won't help you there.
  - throwaway894345 7y ago
    There isn’t inheritance, so there are no hierarchies in the problematic sense.
    - apta 7y ago
      You get problems like this, which you don't get in traditional OO languages: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16474 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16474
      - throwaway894345 7y ago
        What are you talking about? You could do exactly this in Java or C# or Python or Ruby or JS or etc. Not sure what ”traditional” languages you’re talking about, but this is just reflection and downcasting. It’s a bad idea, but it’s unrelated to OOP.
        apta 7y ago
        You can't cast a type to an arbitrary interface and hope that it implements the method(s) you want to call in Java or C#.
svat 7y ago
See https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article "Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering" for some of the design goals of Go and how they led to its current design. (For example, gofmt/gofix make automated refactorings across a large codebase (different teams) easier or more pleasant.)
chucky_z 7y ago
As someone who has written more C# and Java than Go... I can read Go much easier than most other languages. I can step into a huge codebase and usually quickly reason what/where I need to make my changes without too much effort. This can be the case with C# and Java, but it seems to almost always be the case with Go.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  This means there's no payoff for specializing because the project has no domain-specific idioms that help at all with clarity and concision—no matter what you learn and how fluent you get, all code will look like the bulky mediocre stuff a novice would have written.

> large scale collaboration What does golang have to facilitate large scale collaboration that isn't done better in languages such as Java or C#?

by apta 7y ago

> large scale collaboration What does golang have to facilitate large scale collaboration that isn't done better in languages such as Java or C#?

tsimionescu 7y ago

Even more, what does Go have better in terms of dev tooling than Java or C#?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
vips7L 7y ago
It doesn't.
- helvetica2020 7y ago
  Comparing Go to the JVM for dev tooling not to mention the operational ecosystem is a bit silly. JVM is miles ahead.
kasey_junk 7y ago
Go fmt Code formatters are available in Java/C# but not ones that have a default set in stone.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mohaine 7y ago
  Ditto for logging framework, unit test framework, base http framework...
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Those are not dev tools, they are libraries. Also, even though there is no default built in unit test framework in Java and C#, it would be hard to claim JUnit and NUnit aren't essentially that. Ditto for log4j in Java. By the way, I'm not sure you can claim to have a logging framework in your language when it can't even differentiate between debug messages, info and error messages. I'm not sure there is any significant project that can rely on Go log that couldn't as easily use stderr/stdout.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  Ok. But you get to stop discussing some style choices, and instead you lose a decent debugger, a decent (open source) IDE, any graphical profiler, good package management that is separate from your source control tool, and probably a few others I'm missing. And if you care about style trivialities ,you'll still need an external linter, since go fmt doesn't enforce anything about variable names , line length, function length, comment placement, line breaking and many other things some people like to obsess over.
  - andreygrehov 7y ago
    The beauty of Go is that it's so simple that you don't need a debugger. Do you need a word dictionary to read this comment? No, because this comment is simple. Same with Go. But if you need a debugger, there is Delve [1], though I only used it once to debug a dynamic programming algorithm. [1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve https://github.com/go-delve/delve
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      I know about delve, but it's an extremely basic debugger. You can't even pause program execution on demand or execute an arbitrary function while stopped at a breakpoint. Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger. If you are writing a complex program, you sometimes need a debugger to quickly figure out what is going wrong, instead of endless theory -> change/log -> rerun cycles.
      - andreygrehov 7y ago
        > Beyond that, the complexity of a language has nothing to do with how much you need a debugger I disagree. There is a higher chance you need a debugger when trying to understand, say, Scala code versus Go. > If you are writing a complex program [...] Complexity of a program depends on its author. Even a stupid simple function can get complex if the programmer is less experienced. Go has a philosophy to simplify things. The community tries to follow this philosophy as much as possible, which is why a lot of Go code is easy to read regardless of how complex the logic is. In the majority of cases, a need for Go debugger means you are dealing with bad written code. Heck, this idea can be extended to pretty much any language.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  I wish there was Go's code diagram creation tool called "go figure."
Kaze404 7y ago
Considering Go's tooling ecosystem is split in half (supports modules / doesn't support modules), nothing really.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  To be fair, all languages that have not had modules built in suffer from this to some extent or another. The main good part about Java is that they have compatibility between code using modules and code that doesn't.
closeparen 7y ago
- Native build system - Auto-formatting - Good first-party testing and benchmarking - Ppprof runs circles around VisualVM All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great. On a meta level, combination of the AST package and deterministic code formatting means it's relatively easy to write programs that manipulate source code.
- vips7L 7y ago
  Just a nit, Java Microbenchmark Harness is apart of OpenJDK so it is "first-party".
  - closeparen 7y ago
    Oh good point. We're on Java 8 and migrating to 11...
    - vips7L 7y ago
      I've been enjoying the standard library improvements in 11. The http and websocket clients are pretty easy to use.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  > All these things are available for Java (MVN/Gradle, JUnit, IDEA, YourKit, etc) but having one right way to do them built in is pretty great. It's great if you're just starting out, but it's irrelevant in the long run. It can even be harmful when it's coupled with the language, as you get things like having the packaging tool become deprecated, like with go dep, since a 3rd party tool can't compete with a first party tool for adoption, especially in a relatively young language like Go. For pprof vs VisualVM - I haven't yet done a lot of CPU profiling with them, but for memory I have had the exact opposite experience. VisualVM and Eclipse MAT are much easier to understand and have much more functionality for analyzing the memory of a Java process than pprof offers. Not sure what (pseudo-)deterministic code formatting has to do with the ease of manipulating program code, but having a built-in AST package is indeed a good idea. Too bad it hasn't been used to write any useful refactoring tools for Go (outside of JetBrains Goland? Haven't tried that yet). I have heard that Google uses go fix recipes to make modifications across their code base, but haven't seen any examples, and I doubt it can realistically be done in a code base that is not ridiculously well tested, and that it didn't require any manual intervention in a few corner cases in Google as well (assuming they did more than a rename).

tmountain 7y ago

Not a Golang expert or zealot, but a few things come to mind that make it suited for large scale projects and collaboration: 1) Extremely fast build times (even for large codebases). 2) The package system plugs directly into Git/Github. The second reduces friction for distributed/large teams to share packages with a lower administrative burden. I can't compare to modern Java/C# because I haven't used either for quite some time.

apta 7y ago
> 1) Extremely fast build times (even for large codebases). Not much faster than C# or Java in practice, especially when using a build system that caches your build so you don't have to rebuild everything every time. The difference actually gets smaller the larger the program is. Furthermore, it's (unit/functional/integration) tests that usually take the longer time to run anyway, which you have to execute before submitting your diffs (and caching helps there as well). > 2) The package system plugs directly into Git/Github. This doesn't suite everyone, as not all projects are open source. > with a lower administrative burden. Any serious company is not going to (1) allow arbitrary code to be pulled from github/etc. and (2) needs to maintain a local repository of it anyway in case github/maven/etc. goes down.
- sagichmal 7y ago
  > Not much faster than C# or Java in practice Go compile times are pretty inarguably faster than these in practice, yes.
  - apta 7y ago
    Seems like you haven't worked with actual large scale golang code bases then.
    - hu3 7y ago
      I have. Both C# and Go 500k+ LOC codebases. Compilation time between them is a magnitude apart it's not even arguable.

mxschumacher 7y ago

The simplicity of the language means no gigantic class hierarchies. Theres are fewer ways to do something. Since engineers spend most of their time reading and debugging, readability and low abstractions facilitate collaboration: it should be relatively straightforward to jump into any Go codebase. People often laud the relative ease of picking up the language. They're productive quickly, that's not by accident.

zerr 7y ago
It doesn't restrict gigantic hierarchies per se, just the compiler won't help you there.
- throwaway894345 7y ago
  There isn’t inheritance, so there are no hierarchies in the problematic sense.
  - apta 7y ago
    You get problems like this, which you don't get in traditional OO languages: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16474 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/16474
    - throwaway894345 7y ago
      What are you talking about? You could do exactly this in Java or C# or Python or Ruby or JS or etc. Not sure what ”traditional” languages you’re talking about, but this is just reflection and downcasting. It’s a bad idea, but it’s unrelated to OOP.
      - apta 7y ago
        You can't cast a type to an arbitrary interface and hope that it implements the method(s) you want to call in Java or C#.

svat 7y ago

See https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article "Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering" for some of the design goals of Go and how they led to its current design. (For example, gofmt/gofix make automated refactorings across a large codebase (different teams) easier or more pleasant.)

chucky_z 7y ago

As someone who has written more C# and Java than Go... I can read Go much easier than most other languages. I can step into a huge codebase and usually quickly reason what/where I need to make my changes without too much effort. This can be the case with C# and Java, but it seems to almost always be the case with Go.

erik_seaberg 7y ago
This means there's no payoff for specializing because the project has no domain-specific idioms that help at all with clarity and concision—no matter what you learn and how fluent you get, all code will look like the bulky mediocre stuff a novice would have written.