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As someone who's got a lot of Java experience but almost no Go experience, I worry that I've been coddled with a humongous standard library for pretty much ever

As someone who's got a lot of Java experience but almost no Go experience, I worry that I've been coddled with a humongous standard library for pretty much everything, from collections of every sort to handling of time, units, strings, I/O buffers, and pretty much every data structure I might need. Do you find that the Go ecosystem is rich enough that you can find whatever you require?

rlawson 3y ago
Yes I had the exact same question. Philosophically I like Go better but I worry in practice that Java has me spoiled
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  The Go ecosystem has everything one needs. The cryptography stuff is nicer than any Java library (sorry BouncyCastle), first class tls everywhere, very decent http client/server support and tons community routers, third-party collections are easy to come by, ssh in standard library, any package from the internet can be directly pulled as a dependency, packages can be renamed without the need of shadowing, kafka clients, any cloud sdk, everything what one can imagine. I was a heavy java snd scala user before 2018 and 5 years later I’m not missing anything. For what it’s worth, life got easier when I moved to Go.
holografix 3y ago
Go introduced generics as of recently therefore you won’t find many of the more sophisticated collection types like trees and sorted lists etc. However there is an effort to include the usual suspects in the standard lib.
matrix87 3y ago
> Do you find that the Go ecosystem is rich enough that you can find whatever you require? For what I require (which is atm concurrent web services, restful and grpc APIs, occasional CLIs, k8s tools), it's on par with java For collections, I don't think go has the same variety as java built in but there are 3rd party implementations for more niche data structures like rb trees. Bare essentials like arraylists and hashmaps come built in In general, yeah ecosystem is more than good enough for me. Only big thing that I can think of that's missing is gui stuff like swing in java
jmaker 3y ago
In my experience, in most cases you realize you’re imminent to reinvent a wheel, you start sifting through the packages available and check GitHub, see what one or another package is up to, then I check whether the functionality that I need is well tested, in many cases it is not, sometimes you get perplexed skimming through the issues, there are few uniformly good packages in many cases, you always see something popping up that’s been smoothed out in a Java pendent long ago. It’s tricky. With JVM bound projects I’ve rarely felt compelled to actually examine the rather foundational packages. With Go, however, I’m often surprised, even when looking at the more popular packages or framework, kind of a different attitude, you know. Same goes to the Go runtime system behavior. The deeper you look the more you can see, I guess. There’s always a caveat somewhere around the corner. That said, I do have a few Go systems in production. I love the lower memory footprint though it often comes at a cost of unnecessary CPU thrashing, which for the IO bound services I consider acceptable. I see some companies move to Go, the sentiment I’ve perceived is mixed.
deleted 3y ago
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lenkite 3y ago
As someone who has been through Java->Go, get ready to write a LOT of for loops. You will need to use your IDE abbreviations a lot. Especially for "if err != nil". No exceptions nor result types. Go is a LOT more verbose than Java when compared at the whole file level thanks to these missing features. Go has no comfortable streams or standardized functional interfaces and generics is still in the "baby" phase. Though to be fair, Java generics is also merely toddler level, compared to C++/Rust. To be honest, I like the latest Java releases better than Go. Go had an advantage over Java thanks to in-built virtual concurrency, but that advantage has been lost with Java 21 virtual threads. Go still retains the advantages of a stream-lined yet full-featured and cohesive standard library, fast compilation and crisp, native executables. (However, for the last bit, GraalVM has been rapidly improving for Java)

rlawson 3y ago

Yes I had the exact same question. Philosophically I like Go better but I worry in practice that Java has me spoiled

rad_gruchalski 3y ago
The Go ecosystem has everything one needs. The cryptography stuff is nicer than any Java library (sorry BouncyCastle), first class tls everywhere, very decent http client/server support and tons community routers, third-party collections are easy to come by, ssh in standard library, any package from the internet can be directly pulled as a dependency, packages can be renamed without the need of shadowing, kafka clients, any cloud sdk, everything what one can imagine. I was a heavy java snd scala user before 2018 and 5 years later I’m not missing anything. For what it’s worth, life got easier when I moved to Go.

holografix 3y ago

Go introduced generics as of recently therefore you won’t find many of the more sophisticated collection types like trees and sorted lists etc. However there is an effort to include the usual suspects in the standard lib.

matrix87 3y ago

> Do you find that the Go ecosystem is rich enough that you can find whatever you require? For what I require (which is atm concurrent web services, restful and grpc APIs, occasional CLIs, k8s tools), it's on par with java For collections, I don't think go has the same variety as java built in but there are 3rd party implementations for more niche data structures like rb trees. Bare essentials like arraylists and hashmaps come built in In general, yeah ecosystem is more than good enough for me. Only big thing that I can think of that's missing is gui stuff like swing in java

jmaker 3y ago

In my experience, in most cases you realize you’re imminent to reinvent a wheel, you start sifting through the packages available and check GitHub, see what one or another package is up to, then I check whether the functionality that I need is well tested, in many cases it is not, sometimes you get perplexed skimming through the issues, there are few uniformly good packages in many cases, you always see something popping up that’s been smoothed out in a Java pendent long ago. It’s tricky. With JVM bound projects I’ve rarely felt compelled to actually examine the rather foundational packages. With Go, however, I’m often surprised, even when looking at the more popular packages or framework, kind of a different attitude, you know. Same goes to the Go runtime system behavior. The deeper you look the more you can see, I guess. There’s always a caveat somewhere around the corner. That said, I do have a few Go systems in production. I love the lower memory footprint though it often comes at a cost of unnecessary CPU thrashing, which for the IO bound services I consider acceptable. I see some companies move to Go, the sentiment I’ve perceived is mixed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lenkite 3y ago

As someone who has been through Java->Go, get ready to write a LOT of for loops. You will need to use your IDE abbreviations a lot. Especially for "if err != nil". No exceptions nor result types. Go is a LOT more verbose than Java when compared at the whole file level thanks to these missing features. Go has no comfortable streams or standardized functional interfaces and generics is still in the "baby" phase. Though to be fair, Java generics is also merely toddler level, compared to C++/Rust. To be honest, I like the latest Java releases better than Go. Go had an advantage over Java thanks to in-built virtual concurrency, but that advantage has been lost with Java 21 virtual threads. Go still retains the advantages of a stream-lined yet full-featured and cohesive standard library, fast compilation and crisp, native executables. (However, for the last bit, GraalVM has been rapidly improving for Java)