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We have a few go web apps to maintain and, honestly it's not a pleasant experience. - Package management is terrible. - Development on Mac is not a great expe

We have a few go web apps to maintain and, honestly it's not a pleasant experience. - Package management is terrible. - Development on Mac is not a great experience (someone in the team purchased a paid IDE, everyone else just run everything through a docker image, are we missing something obvious?). - The language is not flexible enough (lack of generics?) and code is significantly longer. - Lots of quirks. I'm sure you can learn the language and overcome these small annoyances (and that's exactly what we did, because we wanted to squeeze more performance out of our services), but personally I think nowadays we have better languages which perform just as well (eg. Rust).

lanstin 6y ago
Since they added go mod I find the dependency management to be ok. And I use emacs so Mac or Linux it is a pleasant experience. You have first class lambdas so you can do pretty much anything in the language that doesn’t depend on syntax. It is a language with the aesthetics of C - small and simple syntax. Things that make the code more verbose, eg error checking, are things C programmers think you should do anyways and are morally suspect if you set up some invisible throw/catch system between your lower level code and your top level. Everyone typing code must reason about errors.
- djeiasbsbo 6y ago
  Worth noting that Go Modules are still relatively new (Blog post from March, 2019 - https://blog.golang.org/using-go-modules https://blog.golang.org/using-go-modules) so some people in this thread might not be aware of them. I find that dependency management works well enough now.
wrs 6y ago
Go works fine for me on the Mac with VS Code — in fact I recently used it to develop a Windows service so I wouldn’t have to deal with Windows (except for testing, of course). The cross-compiling is really easy.

lanstin 6y ago

Since they added go mod I find the dependency management to be ok. And I use emacs so Mac or Linux it is a pleasant experience. You have first class lambdas so you can do pretty much anything in the language that doesn’t depend on syntax. It is a language with the aesthetics of C - small and simple syntax. Things that make the code more verbose, eg error checking, are things C programmers think you should do anyways and are morally suspect if you set up some invisible throw/catch system between your lower level code and your top level. Everyone typing code must reason about errors.

djeiasbsbo 6y ago
Worth noting that Go Modules are still relatively new (Blog post from March, 2019 - https://blog.golang.org/using-go-modules https://blog.golang.org/using-go-modules) so some people in this thread might not be aware of them. I find that dependency management works well enough now.

wrs 6y ago

Go works fine for me on the Mac with VS Code — in fact I recently used it to develop a Windows service so I wouldn’t have to deal with Windows (except for testing, of course). The cross-compiling is really easy.