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Why do you say Go has trouble scaling to large code bases? Is that something you'd expect, or something borne out by the evidence? And if so, what is the eviden

Why do you say Go has trouble scaling to large code bases? Is that something you'd expect, or something borne out by the evidence? And if so, what is the evidence?

brundolf 6y ago
It's the subjective impression I've formed from, among other things, reading articles like this: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with-types https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with... Ctrl+F for "Let's start with Go" to jump to the relevant part
- philosopher1234 6y ago
  FWIW I would take fasterthanli.me with a grain of salt. The guy is a serial Go hater. His points stand on their own, but I don't think he appreciates Go's benefits. I think "A Philosophy of Software Design," Rob Pike's talks, or Russ Cox's blog posts are a good place to look if you want to understand what is valuable about Go and the reason to believe it would actually scale very well to large codebases.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Thanks for the references, I'll look at what the other side has to say I am aware that fasterthanli.me can be a bit, shall we say... opinionated. Though as you say, his points do stand on their own. I can see the things he points out about the design philosophy of Go's language features and standard library and draw parallels to languages and libraries that I've used firsthand, and had firsthand frustrating experiences with when it came to navigating their magical behavior and lack of enforcement of contracts. But I'll keep an open-mind
    - philosopher1234 6y ago
      Certainly. As a counter-example to the pain of implicit functionality, take the UNIX file API. `open(1), write(1), close(2)...` represent hundreds of thousands of lines of code, spanning network devices, local file storage, integrity checking, and who knows what else, and all of it is hidden. It is precisely the mountainous heap of implicit behavior that gives these APIs value. That being said, APIs with implicit function that are broken or surprising are painful, but I take this not as an indictment of implicit function, but as an indictment of buggy APIs. I think state and hidden functionality is the essential ingredient of highly useful code.

Why do you say Go has trouble scaling to large code bases? Is that something you'd expect, or something borne out by the evidence? And if so, what is the evidence?

brundolf 6y ago

It's the subjective impression I've formed from, among other things, reading articles like this: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with-types https://fasterthanli.me/articles/aiming-for-correctness-with... Ctrl+F for "Let's start with Go" to jump to the relevant part

philosopher1234 6y ago
FWIW I would take fasterthanli.me with a grain of salt. The guy is a serial Go hater. His points stand on their own, but I don't think he appreciates Go's benefits. I think "A Philosophy of Software Design," Rob Pike's talks, or Russ Cox's blog posts are a good place to look if you want to understand what is valuable about Go and the reason to believe it would actually scale very well to large codebases.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Thanks for the references, I'll look at what the other side has to say I am aware that fasterthanli.me can be a bit, shall we say... opinionated. Though as you say, his points do stand on their own. I can see the things he points out about the design philosophy of Go's language features and standard library and draw parallels to languages and libraries that I've used firsthand, and had firsthand frustrating experiences with when it came to navigating their magical behavior and lack of enforcement of contracts. But I'll keep an open-mind
  - philosopher1234 6y ago
    Certainly. As a counter-example to the pain of implicit functionality, take the UNIX file API. `open(1), write(1), close(2)...` represent hundreds of thousands of lines of code, spanning network devices, local file storage, integrity checking, and who knows what else, and all of it is hidden. It is precisely the mountainous heap of implicit behavior that gives these APIs value. That being said, APIs with implicit function that are broken or surprising are painful, but I take this not as an indictment of implicit function, but as an indictment of buggy APIs. I think state and hidden functionality is the essential ingredient of highly useful code.