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You choose golang because you basically want java with less memory usage and static single binary deploys for your backend server applications. Go was designed

by novok 5y ago

You choose golang because you basically want java with less memory usage and static single binary deploys for your backend server applications. Go was designed to be a language that development scales very well with it's focus on simplicity and very fast compile speed. Rust on the other hand, was designed to make certain hard things less hard, at the cost of complexity, ease of learning, speed of development (high amount of restrictions) and compile speed. If you have a multi-million line monolith made in rust, I bet your compile speed and edit-build-run cycle will take a very long time and be very painful compared to the same golang one. Hiring will also be harder because the minimum IQ & experience bar is higher and you couldn't have productive jr engineers get up to speed on it nearly as quickly.

azth 5y ago
Java is way more expressive and better designed than golang. So no, golang is not Java with less memory. It's also possible to deploy Java as a single JAR file.
- todd3834 5y ago
  Is this more a matter of preference? Some people feel it is more expressive, others feel it is too verbose. Some people prefer the object oriented design principles, others are turned off by them and really just want structs. I agree the single file argument is not extremely convincing. Especially because engineers are often on Mac on Windows machine and compiling for Linux. While Go does support this, as soon as you have to use a c library dependency (in my experience this was sqlite), then we had to start compiling in the environment we wanted. Easy to solve with docker but deployment wasn't the reason I like Go. I should spend some time thinking about why but overall I just "feel" more productive with Go vs Java (including Kotlin). Go's standard library, docs (with links to the source code), everything just feels super readable and understandable. I don't see much debate agains Go using less memory. I can confirm this was my experience as well. My experience is that it uses a lot less CPU as well.
  - azth 5y ago
    > Is this more a matter of preference? No it isn't. On many times I've been able to simplify golang code that is dozens of line long into something that is only a few lines long in Java, while improving readability and reliability. This is especially useful when exploring a new code base and spending a lot of time perusing boilerplate trying to figure out what's going on.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Java app can be a single executable by using GraalVM Native Image

by novok 5y ago

azth 5y ago

Java is way more expressive and better designed than golang. So no, golang is not Java with less memory. It's also possible to deploy Java as a single JAR file.

todd3834 5y ago
Is this more a matter of preference? Some people feel it is more expressive, others feel it is too verbose. Some people prefer the object oriented design principles, others are turned off by them and really just want structs. I agree the single file argument is not extremely convincing. Especially because engineers are often on Mac on Windows machine and compiling for Linux. While Go does support this, as soon as you have to use a c library dependency (in my experience this was sqlite), then we had to start compiling in the environment we wanted. Easy to solve with docker but deployment wasn't the reason I like Go. I should spend some time thinking about why but overall I just "feel" more productive with Go vs Java (including Kotlin). Go's standard library, docs (with links to the source code), everything just feels super readable and understandable. I don't see much debate agains Go using less memory. I can confirm this was my experience as well. My experience is that it uses a lot less CPU as well.
- azth 5y ago
  > Is this more a matter of preference? No it isn't. On many times I've been able to simplify golang code that is dozens of line long into something that is only a few lines long in Java, while improving readability and reliability. This is especially useful when exploring a new code base and spending a lot of time perusing boilerplate trying to figure out what's going on.
fomine3 5y ago
Java app can be a single executable by using GraalVM Native Image