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> Go is successful because it strikes a strong balance between what practical software engineering organizations need from a language, of which safety is only o
by throwawaymaths 3y ago
> Go is successful because it strikes a strong balance between what practical software engineering organizations need from a language, of which safety is only one constraint.
This is a laughable claim when you've seen other languages (which have resulted in billion dollar companies with low engineering burden) that have done much better than go at this.
Go is successful for other reasons, mainly it plays into the biases of certain class of developers and managers.
- tsimionescu 3y ago> Go is successful for other reasons, mainly it plays into the biases of certain class of developers and managers. While there is definitely an element of that, I think the main reason Go is successful are completely unrelated to the language itself. The main advantage of Go is that it is the one GC language with a slim runtime. Go programs are tiny compared to Java, C#, Python, Haskell etc. They start instantly. And they do so even if they are implementing an HTTP server or other non-trivial things. So Go is excellent at something like containerized microservices, where you want to easily run dozens of containers on a single host, and rely on quick restarts for the occasional bug.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago"The main advantage of Go is that it is the one GC language with a slim runtime" I have worked in places (only startups, no big tech) that deployed go (okay, low n=2) and this was not a consideration.