6 ms·

Go strikes me as one of the best "good enough" languages we have right now. You're not going to do HPC in Go, but it's performant enough to run circles around

by skohan 4y ago

Go strikes me as one of the best "good enough" languages we have right now. You're not going to do HPC in Go, but it's performant enough to run circles around a lot of high level languages and dynamic languages. It abstracts away the stuff that's super error prone about manual memory management, and it's so brutally simple that it's hard for one of your colleagues to write code you're not going to be able to understand. There's a few features that could improve it, like proper ADT's, and it's a bit lacking in expressiveness for me to choose it for personal hobby projects, but I would recommend it any time for general-case professional software development.

kaba0 4y ago
> but it's performant enough to run circles around a lot of high level languages and dynamic languages It ain’t running circles around any managed language, with perhaps the exception of Python. C#, Java, JS all have comparably good performances, sometimes much better - e.g. when GC can’t be avoided.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  Go is in my experience significantly faster than Java, and uses an order of magnitude less memory for equivalent functionality. If you have any data (or better yet, benchmarks I can run on my own machine), I'd very much like to see some hard numbers.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Go can be faster at small, specific programs where memory lifetimes are deterministic and you can use value types. Otherwise, Java will beat every other managed language by a huge margin when it comes to GC-related workflows. Sure, it does so at higher memory usage, but that is a good tradeoff for many use-cases (especially server). Benchmarks are hard to do right but this one does actually measure GC quite well: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/binarytrees.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... (For managed languages. It is not really a fair comparison between non-GC and GC-languages) So all in all, for bigger programs it is hard to do a good comparison, but there is exactly where JIT compilers shine and the memory tradeoff and the like brings their return.
    - skohan 4y ago
      Isn't a lot of server code these days small programs that just pull data out of a database and feed it to an HHTPS response? It seems like it's a pretty good option to have your infrastructure code implemented in a systems programming language like C or Rust (probably AWS or GCP is doing this for you), and just implement your business logic in Go as the type of small, well-defined programs you're talking about.
      - kaba0 4y ago
        But then why go? You can also implement that logic in a likely much more readable way in Python (as at that point performance doesn’t matter), or just write the whole thing in Java/C#/Scala/Kotlin whatever, which in my opinion are more expressive for business logic.
        paskozdilar 4y ago
        Go is much faster than Python, uses less memory, and compiles down to a statically-linked native binary, making containerization trivial. And (IMHO) it's even more readable than Python - nowdays Python code is as easily turned into an unreadable mess as Java or C# code. Just try reading Python standard library and Go standard library - the difference is monumental.
        kaba0 4y ago
        We are talking about business logic. The infrastructure is already in a lower level language, so the performance is not a concern. And we will have to disagree on C#/Java/Python being unreadable mess. In my experience all 3 can be written in a really well maintainable way. I don’t have much experience with Go, but out of these, I would vote for it as the least maintainable (as just because each line is trivial to understand, doesn’t make the whole program flow easy to read. Otherwise why not just write assembly, every line is even more trivial there)
        skohan 4y ago

by skohan 4y ago

kaba0 4y ago

> but it's performant enough to run circles around a lot of high level languages and dynamic languages It ain’t running circles around any managed language, with perhaps the exception of Python. C#, Java, JS all have comparably good performances, sometimes much better - e.g. when GC can’t be avoided.

bheadmaster 4y ago
Go is in my experience significantly faster than Java, and uses an order of magnitude less memory for equivalent functionality. If you have any data (or better yet, benchmarks I can run on my own machine), I'd very much like to see some hard numbers.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Go can be faster at small, specific programs where memory lifetimes are deterministic and you can use value types. Otherwise, Java will beat every other managed language by a huge margin when it comes to GC-related workflows. Sure, it does so at higher memory usage, but that is a good tradeoff for many use-cases (especially server). Benchmarks are hard to do right but this one does actually measure GC quite well: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/performance/binarytrees.html https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... (For managed languages. It is not really a fair comparison between non-GC and GC-languages) So all in all, for bigger programs it is hard to do a good comparison, but there is exactly where JIT compilers shine and the memory tradeoff and the like brings their return.
  - skohan 4y ago
    Isn't a lot of server code these days small programs that just pull data out of a database and feed it to an HHTPS response? It seems like it's a pretty good option to have your infrastructure code implemented in a systems programming language like C or Rust (probably AWS or GCP is doing this for you), and just implement your business logic in Go as the type of small, well-defined programs you're talking about.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      But then why go? You can also implement that logic in a likely much more readable way in Python (as at that point performance doesn’t matter), or just write the whole thing in Java/C#/Scala/Kotlin whatever, which in my opinion are more expressive for business logic.
      - paskozdilar 4y ago
        Go is much faster than Python, uses less memory, and compiles down to a statically-linked native binary, making containerization trivial. And (IMHO) it's even more readable than Python - nowdays Python code is as easily turned into an unreadable mess as Java or C# code. Just try reading Python standard library and Go standard library - the difference is monumental.
        kaba0 4y ago
        We are talking about business logic. The infrastructure is already in a lower level language, so the performance is not a concern. And we will have to disagree on C#/Java/Python being unreadable mess. In my experience all 3 can be written in a really well maintainable way. I don’t have much experience with Go, but out of these, I would vote for it as the least maintainable (as just because each line is trivial to understand, doesn’t make the whole program flow easy to read. Otherwise why not just write assembly, every line is even more trivial there)
        skohan 4y ago