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I absolutely love using Go. The logical flows for my programs are always so clean and easy to follow thanks to the language. Contrast to C++ in which spaghetti

by warent 6y ago

I absolutely love using Go. The logical flows for my programs are always so clean and easy to follow thanks to the language. Contrast to C++ in which spaghetti and magic is basically idiomatic. The only downside I can think of is that error/crash recovery is pretty tricky, but it's only really a concern if you're careless with your goroutines. Whenever I work in Go, I have a lot more confidence in the efficiency of resource usage, and sense of stability that I just don't get from something like Node.js, where I'm constantly wondering... are any of these 1000s of dependencies going to suddenly do something weird like hijack my .env file? How is my program managing memory and overhead when it needs to interface with the kernel via a C++ wrapper? Are these machine resources even being capitalized on by Node.js properly? etc. I've heard a lot of great things about Rust, and I've touched on it a bit, but Go is just awesome for its abstractions, ease-of-use, and of course insanely fast compile times.

Knut4231 6y ago
I have a love/hate relationship with Rust. I love the type system as enthusiast, but as project lead I can't justify relying on so many (partly immature) third party dependencies for business critical stuff.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  This is exactly what I've been thinking. Right now you need enthusiasts and a project that can either accept or handle the risks brought on by the immature ecosystem. Later on, Rust will most definitely be a huge thing. It's just not the right choice for everything - even if the community has a habit of pumping out "X - but with Rust" projects.
- ridv 6y ago
  I had similar feelings when I was hired to write in Go about 3 years ago. Coming from Java where everything (including the kitchen sink) was available for import, it took some time to re-adjust my mindset of having to seek out libraries and thoroughly vet them. After a while, I kinda started to dig having to do it. You end up having a more personal connection with the dependencies you pick which makes it easier to contribute back upstream. The one downside of being around in this stage of a language's ecosystem development is you can potentially get some pretty undesirable fragmentation. A good example that comes to mind is one of the original Go library to interact with Zookeeper. There's like 6 maintained forks of that library due to the original author bowing out of maintaining it.
blub 6y ago
"Spaghetti" means that the code is tangled because of improper control flow usage, lack of adequate control flow syntax or the language encouraging certain patterns. There are very few mainstream programming languages which can be said to encourage writing spaghetti code, I can think of VB6 and early versions of PHP which encouraged mixing e.g. HTML with code. Claiming that C++ spaghetti code is idiomatic is nonsense. There are many very popular references on how to structure and design C++ code and idiomatic C++ code is making use of structural, OOP or functional programming where appropriate. "Magic" refers to the implementation of certain language or library features directly in the compiler without using the language features. C++ is on the least magical side, since the entire standard library and major libraries are implemented exclusively using language features. Everything is specified and C++ is one of the very few languages which has an international standard. It's especially odd to call other languages out for this when Go for example has magical generic data structures when this feature isn't supported by the language. Next time consider limiting your comment to praising Go and don't pretend that you know enough about other languages to draw a meaningful comparison.

by warent 6y ago

Knut4231 6y ago

I have a love/hate relationship with Rust. I love the type system as enthusiast, but as project lead I can't justify relying on so many (partly immature) third party dependencies for business critical stuff.

theshrike79 6y ago
This is exactly what I've been thinking. Right now you need enthusiasts and a project that can either accept or handle the risks brought on by the immature ecosystem. Later on, Rust will most definitely be a huge thing. It's just not the right choice for everything - even if the community has a habit of pumping out "X - but with Rust" projects.
ridv 6y ago
I had similar feelings when I was hired to write in Go about 3 years ago. Coming from Java where everything (including the kitchen sink) was available for import, it took some time to re-adjust my mindset of having to seek out libraries and thoroughly vet them. After a while, I kinda started to dig having to do it. You end up having a more personal connection with the dependencies you pick which makes it easier to contribute back upstream. The one downside of being around in this stage of a language's ecosystem development is you can potentially get some pretty undesirable fragmentation. A good example that comes to mind is one of the original Go library to interact with Zookeeper. There's like 6 maintained forks of that library due to the original author bowing out of maintaining it.

blub 6y ago

"Spaghetti" means that the code is tangled because of improper control flow usage, lack of adequate control flow syntax or the language encouraging certain patterns. There are very few mainstream programming languages which can be said to encourage writing spaghetti code, I can think of VB6 and early versions of PHP which encouraged mixing e.g. HTML with code. Claiming that C++ spaghetti code is idiomatic is nonsense. There are many very popular references on how to structure and design C++ code and idiomatic C++ code is making use of structural, OOP or functional programming where appropriate. "Magic" refers to the implementation of certain language or library features directly in the compiler without using the language features. C++ is on the least magical side, since the entire standard library and major libraries are implemented exclusively using language features. Everything is specified and C++ is one of the very few languages which has an international standard. It's especially odd to call other languages out for this when Go for example has magical generic data structures when this feature isn't supported by the language. Next time consider limiting your comment to praising Go and don't pretend that you know enough about other languages to draw a meaningful comparison.