4 ms·

> The reason Go got so popular is not because of its type system, but because it also has a mode of programming "good enough" prototypes. You can Grug program

by Ygg2 2y ago

> The reason Go got so popular is not because of its type system, but because it also has a mode of programming "good enough" prototypes. You can Grug program in any language. Including Rust. Just clone, Arc, and unwrap everything. The reason why Go got popular is: A) It's backed by Google (this is essential, there are many languages simpler/easier than it) B) It's easy to pickup

tucnak 2y ago
How is (A) relevant? It's not like Google is pouring lots of money into Go! The use of Go _inside_ Google is limited at best. I would say, the success of Go is exactly aligned with the success of cloud plumbing as a whole: Docker, Hashistack, Kubernetes (which is not successful "because Google", but rather because it's virtually unmatched in capability and just happens to be written in Go.) People like to say Google has helped Go succeed, however in reality Google's influence is vastly overstated. This is nothing else but expendable excuse, see "big company = big money = bad." Apple spent order of magnitude more on Swift, and yet it's not as successful outside of a handful applications. Google itself had _actually_ spent orders of magnitude more on Dart, enabling its adoption, holding conferences, investing deeply into Flutter, and it's nowhere near as successful as Go. The real reason Go is a success is the Go team, and engineering prowess they brought to the table. Go is the language where people get shit done; now, Rust may be "the most loved language" or whatever, but the overwhelming success of Go as a programming platform (which is Rust community is supposedly obsessed with) cannot be attributed to anything else but engineering reasons. People like it. Why do they like it? Because it's easy to use, gets out the way, and it gets the job done. You find a library on Github, read the godoc, and you're literally seconds away from incorporating it in your program. This is not something you can get by accident, by means of investment, or otherwise by making bad design decisions.
- cookiengineer 2y ago
  I'd also like to add that Go has the advantage that its ideology of using a "pure go until the syscall level" approach is what makes it an optimal malware development language. It's so much easier to develop and deploy malware because most of the EDR world focus heavily on the "C-like world" and its limitations. The only other project that comes close to what you can do with Go when it comes to mutating binaries is in my opinion the APE/cosmopolitan ecosystem. But those binaries tend to get flagged immediately because there's no major software that's being used that requires APE binaries to run. On the other hand, the static parts of any Go binary (the head/runtime part) can't be flagged because of so many devops tools rely on Go binaries to work. There was the Ebowla incident in 2016, where all go binaries (including docker) were flagged as malware because the static parts were added as yara rules in Kaspersky and other Antivirus tools. They had to revert those changes after a week.

by Ygg2 2y ago

tucnak 2y ago

How is (A) relevant? It's not like Google is pouring lots of money into Go! The use of Go _inside_ Google is limited at best. I would say, the success of Go is exactly aligned with the success of cloud plumbing as a whole: Docker, Hashistack, Kubernetes (which is not successful "because Google", but rather because it's virtually unmatched in capability and just happens to be written in Go.) People like to say Google has helped Go succeed, however in reality Google's influence is vastly overstated. This is nothing else but expendable excuse, see "big company = big money = bad." Apple spent order of magnitude more on Swift, and yet it's not as successful outside of a handful applications. Google itself had _actually_ spent orders of magnitude more on Dart, enabling its adoption, holding conferences, investing deeply into Flutter, and it's nowhere near as successful as Go. The real reason Go is a success is the Go team, and engineering prowess they brought to the table. Go is the language where people get shit done; now, Rust may be "the most loved language" or whatever, but the overwhelming success of Go as a programming platform (which is Rust community is supposedly obsessed with) cannot be attributed to anything else but engineering reasons. People like it. Why do they like it? Because it's easy to use, gets out the way, and it gets the job done. You find a library on Github, read the godoc, and you're literally seconds away from incorporating it in your program. This is not something you can get by accident, by means of investment, or otherwise by making bad design decisions.

cookiengineer 2y ago
I'd also like to add that Go has the advantage that its ideology of using a "pure go until the syscall level" approach is what makes it an optimal malware development language. It's so much easier to develop and deploy malware because most of the EDR world focus heavily on the "C-like world" and its limitations. The only other project that comes close to what you can do with Go when it comes to mutating binaries is in my opinion the APE/cosmopolitan ecosystem. But those binaries tend to get flagged immediately because there's no major software that's being used that requires APE binaries to run. On the other hand, the static parts of any Go binary (the head/runtime part) can't be flagged because of so many devops tools rely on Go binaries to work. There was the Ebowla incident in 2016, where all go binaries (including docker) were flagged as malware because the static parts were added as yara rules in Kaspersky and other Antivirus tools. They had to revert those changes after a week.