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| with no frills. People say this like it's a bad thing. It's not, it's Go's primary strength.

by emseetech 2y ago

selfmodruntime 2y ago
Yes. For Webservers. Not for compilers. I wrote a bunch of compilers, and Go is not a language I would choose for this.
- bilekas 2y ago
  Go is exceptionally fast for a transpiler. Esbuild is a great example.. Rust would offer any significant gains vs adoption for support.
- 9rx 2y ago
  Unless, of course, you are not working on a greenfield project and instead are porting an existing compiler from Typescript, in which case Go is the language you would choose as it is the language that most closely resembles Typescript, allowing ease of bulk conversion by script. The same reason why it was chosen for Typescript.
  - selfmodruntime 2y ago
    I read that response and I agree entirely! Porting Js to Rust isn’t feasible. I love Rust but it’s good to know your constraints.
whattidywhat 2y ago
I can see the appeal. Not having to write C# style oop probably gave the team a huge productivity boost. I bet it compiles hundreds of times faster making the team, cicd, and dev efforts substantially more productive. Cohesive integrated modern tooling is also a huge plus. Project structure is considerably simpler... I am not really a go fan but I would chose it over c# in a majority of cases as well. I think they missed out by not going with Rust. It seems like the social factors weighed out. Probably hard to quickly assemble a rust team within msft. Again though that makes Go a practical choice. I don't see why people are so confused by it. Go is a pretty widely used and solid choice to get things done reliably and quickly these days.
- commandersaki 2y ago
  The reason they didn't do Rust is because it was faster and more reliable to port the compiler and Go was a strong match particularly because of struct layout, types, concurrency, etc. but most importantly because it was native code with automatic garbage collection which Rust simply doesn't have. There's a video of Anders talking specifically about this.
  - whattidywhat 2y ago
    The automatic gc doesn't seem like an actual deal breaker though. They probably just didn't want to redesign a bunch of data types that assumed one existed. I'm not arguing saying they made a bad call. I think what they did was smart with the options in front of them and whatever budget they have. The world isn't good for idealism, but it ideally could have been written in rust in my opinion.
    - commandersaki 2y ago
      > it ideally could have been written in rust in my opinion What exactly would that buy and would the outcome matter much? In my opinion: pragmatism > idealism.
      - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
        exactly , it sounds as if he is entitled to rust software. Golang is generally very fast and simple as well , the only problem is of memory allocation / garbage collector overhead but the benefits outweigh the loss.
        whattidywhat 2y ago
        I do like rust and like I said, ideally in my opinion. I also did say choosing go was more pragmatic. We are on the same page believe it or not.
    - zveyaeyv3sfye 2y ago

| with no frills. People say this like it's a bad thing. It's not, it's Go's primary strength.

selfmodruntime 2y ago

Yes. For Webservers. Not for compilers. I wrote a bunch of compilers, and Go is not a language I would choose for this.

bilekas 2y ago
Go is exceptionally fast for a transpiler. Esbuild is a great example.. Rust would offer any significant gains vs adoption for support.
9rx 2y ago
Unless, of course, you are not working on a greenfield project and instead are porting an existing compiler from Typescript, in which case Go is the language you would choose as it is the language that most closely resembles Typescript, allowing ease of bulk conversion by script. The same reason why it was chosen for Typescript.
- selfmodruntime 2y ago
  I read that response and I agree entirely! Porting Js to Rust isn’t feasible. I love Rust but it’s good to know your constraints.

whattidywhat 2y ago

I can see the appeal. Not having to write C# style oop probably gave the team a huge productivity boost. I bet it compiles hundreds of times faster making the team, cicd, and dev efforts substantially more productive. Cohesive integrated modern tooling is also a huge plus. Project structure is considerably simpler... I am not really a go fan but I would chose it over c# in a majority of cases as well. I think they missed out by not going with Rust. It seems like the social factors weighed out. Probably hard to quickly assemble a rust team within msft. Again though that makes Go a practical choice. I don't see why people are so confused by it. Go is a pretty widely used and solid choice to get things done reliably and quickly these days.

commandersaki 2y ago
The reason they didn't do Rust is because it was faster and more reliable to port the compiler and Go was a strong match particularly because of struct layout, types, concurrency, etc. but most importantly because it was native code with automatic garbage collection which Rust simply doesn't have. There's a video of Anders talking specifically about this.
- whattidywhat 2y ago
  The automatic gc doesn't seem like an actual deal breaker though. They probably just didn't want to redesign a bunch of data types that assumed one existed. I'm not arguing saying they made a bad call. I think what they did was smart with the options in front of them and whatever budget they have. The world isn't good for idealism, but it ideally could have been written in rust in my opinion.
  - commandersaki 2y ago
    > it ideally could have been written in rust in my opinion What exactly would that buy and would the outcome matter much? In my opinion: pragmatism > idealism.
    - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
      exactly , it sounds as if he is entitled to rust software. Golang is generally very fast and simple as well , the only problem is of memory allocation / garbage collector overhead but the benefits outweigh the loss.
      - whattidywhat 2y ago
        I do like rust and like I said, ideally in my opinion. I also did say choosing go was more pragmatic. We are on the same page believe it or not.
  - zveyaeyv3sfye 2y ago