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> Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. You can ship one compiled binary in Java too if you want it. https://www

> Go's major selling point to me is that you can ship one binary, nothing beats that. You can ship one compiled binary in Java too if you want it. https://www.graalvm.org/22.0/reference-manual/native-image/ https://www.graalvm.org/22.0/reference-manual/native-image/ > Go is simple. It's easy to understand, read, and maintain Go involves a lot of code repetition which makes it difficult to human-scan and maintain. Worked on both large scale Go and Java projects and I found Java projects easier and more comfortable to maintain. Had to pay a lot more attention to Go. Go is easier to write though thanks to its well-designed and extensive standard library which is possibly the best in the world, but the maintenance angle still tilts to Java. There are also more Gotchas in Go compared to Java.

reacharavindh 3y ago
I’m neither a Golang nor a Java developer per se, but I touch source from both as an SRE. I find it weird to see so many comments saying Go is verbose and Java is not. I found the opposite to be true. To do every little thing, the Java code has a ton of abstraction, and the actual implementation of anything is so far removed from the place where it is used that it gives me such a headache to touch anything without wondering “whatever else would break if I change this behavior?!” However, the Go code bases I’ve encountered have been less abstract and to the point(even if it means repetition of some little things). I also found it to be free of boilerplate except for the if err != nil part. I guess those that have spent decades in such abstractions must have learnt a skill to navigate such a spaghetti. But, I still hate it every time.
- lenkite 3y ago
  Quite a bit depends on how the codebase has been written and what era are you looking. Before Java 8/9 or after it. Java code written in the recent era is pretty lean and mean. No matter the amount of abstraction though, one rarely runs into the sort of issues in Java that Go code tend to run into frequently - causing multi-million dollar mistakes frequently even for experienced Go programmers. For loop semantics https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619047 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619047, Unintended variable shadowing, common mistakes in slice appends/copies, slices and memory leaks, defers inside loops, nil interface vs nil, panics in go-routines. There are loads of bugs in OSS projects wrt to these usually repeated again and again. Go is very simple to learn and very hard to master writing bug-free code. Looking forward to seeing how languages like Rust perform if/when adopted by enterprise.
vips7L 3y ago
> You can ship one compiled binary in Java Even if you’re shipping a jar. You can ship one artifact by using jlink or you ship the runtime in the docker image. This has been a solved issue for ages.

reacharavindh 3y ago

I’m neither a Golang nor a Java developer per se, but I touch source from both as an SRE. I find it weird to see so many comments saying Go is verbose and Java is not. I found the opposite to be true. To do every little thing, the Java code has a ton of abstraction, and the actual implementation of anything is so far removed from the place where it is used that it gives me such a headache to touch anything without wondering “whatever else would break if I change this behavior?!” However, the Go code bases I’ve encountered have been less abstract and to the point(even if it means repetition of some little things). I also found it to be free of boilerplate except for the if err != nil part. I guess those that have spent decades in such abstractions must have learnt a skill to navigate such a spaghetti. But, I still hate it every time.

lenkite 3y ago
Quite a bit depends on how the codebase has been written and what era are you looking. Before Java 8/9 or after it. Java code written in the recent era is pretty lean and mean. No matter the amount of abstraction though, one rarely runs into the sort of issues in Java that Go code tend to run into frequently - causing multi-million dollar mistakes frequently even for experienced Go programmers. For loop semantics https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619047 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619047, Unintended variable shadowing, common mistakes in slice appends/copies, slices and memory leaks, defers inside loops, nil interface vs nil, panics in go-routines. There are loads of bugs in OSS projects wrt to these usually repeated again and again. Go is very simple to learn and very hard to master writing bug-free code. Looking forward to seeing how languages like Rust perform if/when adopted by enterprise.

vips7L 3y ago

> You can ship one compiled binary in Java Even if you’re shipping a jar. You can ship one artifact by using jlink or you ship the runtime in the docker image. This has been a solved issue for ages.