10 ms·

Rust is what I had hoped Go would be. Google employs some of the brightest computer science minds in the world and turns out stuff like Go and Dart, which seem

Rust is what I had hoped Go would be. Google employs some of the brightest computer science minds in the world and turns out stuff like Go and Dart, which seem to be more aimed at enterprise Java programmers rather than computer scientists or programming enthusiasts.

tptacek 14y ago
What do Go and Dart have to do with each other, besides their origin at one of the largest tech companies in the world? Have you written much Go? What do you think of it in practice?
- megaman821 14y ago
  As languages, nothing. In design, their conservative nature.
  - cmccabe 14y ago
    Go is not a conservative language. A conservative language would be something like D, which is mostly a clone of C++ with a few extra features tossed in. Go is a highly opinionated language with at least three big new ideas: * goroutines for concurrency ("Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating") * a new type system which is based on structural subtyping (some people have called this static duck typing). * use of return codes rather than exceptions for routine error conditions ("We don't want to encourage the conflation of errors and exceptions that occur in languages such as Java." See https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/iqAiKAwP6Ce https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/iqAiKAwP... ) Just those three things are enough to make Go code look very from what came before. And I could go on-- things like the way go does namespaces and scoping are also very different. It's a different philosophy that leads to much better code, in my opinion at least, not dozens of gee-whiz features, which seems to be what the languages of the 1990s gave us and are continuing to give us.
    - pacala 14y ago
      > We don't want to encourage the conflation of errors and exceptions that occur in languages such as Java. I'm not getting this argument: checked exception == error runtime exception == panic
    - cygx 14y ago
      Except these big new ideas have been around for decades, some of them for nearly half a century. You're right that Go is not conservative, though, but retro, trying to mitigate the damage done by C and C++.
      - cmccabe 14y ago
        The ideas of Go are new to the mainstream, and at the end of the day, that's what matters. It's a programming language, not a PhD thesis.
    - papsosouid 14y ago
      None of those three "big new ideas" are big or new. Go is incredibly conservative, primitive even. It takes a few tiny things like those you mentioned from languages that have had them for decades, but leaves out so much important stuff that the language is barely useful at all.
mtgx 14y ago
Maybe because that's what Google needs its own programmers to learn right now. Although, they should make a language that's meant to eventually replace Java/Dalvik for Android as well, and a language that's very easy to use and learn.
- Lewisham 14y ago
  Yeah, absolutely. Go and Dart really both fit needs of working with large software and giant scales. As I think they've both said independently, conservative design was considered a design bonus. You can see why as it gets teams up-to-speed quickly, is less off-putting to project managers, and is more likely to benefit from experience surrounding how to write effective, readable code forms. Stuff like Rust is awesome, but no-one yet knows what an Effective Rust book might look like, and you really need that sort of solidified design understanding to work. Code is write once, read hundreds of times, so that exciting wild west of "we don't have idioms yet" simply won't fly at a big company.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  One could automatically translate the Java API part of Android into Go? Also, it should be possible to write a VM for Go by extending Dalvik? I suspect that this territory is claimed by Dart, however.
kibwen 14y ago
Neither Mozilla nor Google are particularly keen to faff around designing languages for the hell of it. :) Google needed to ease the burden of hours-long Java/C++ compile times on massive projects. Hence Go. Mozilla needed a language that was as fast as C++, but safer and trivially parallelizable. Hence Rust. Beyond these goals, the fact that the rest of the world is excited for these languages is just gravy.
- zobzu 14y ago
  Well, that makes Mozilla's language goals a lot sexier to a lot of us i believe =P
- nightski 14y ago
  Seems weird. Google especially is a company that relies so much on programmer productivity & getting things right. Getting them wrong typically means lost revenue. I mean they spend crazy amounts of money on all kinds of projects that have no directly viable monetization scheme, yet for some reason you think it would be weird for them to explore programming languages? Odd.
- neilk 14y ago
  You attribute too much to these entities called "Google" and "Mozilla". They're made of people. No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches. At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators is unmistakable. In any case, I doubt there is any plan to move everything in Google to Go. They're willing to let the creators and some enthusiasts play around with it, maybe deploy a few apps internally. But for Rust to be a success, Mozilla's going to have to use it extensively in their main product.
  - kibwen 14y ago
    "No executive asks for a new programming language." Not that I think you're wrong, but I think the histories of Javascript and Ada stand as exceptions. :)
zxcdw 14y ago
I'm assuming you'd rather see them focus on declarative programming, because it seems to be the big thing among enthusiasts and hobbyists. Google works with software projects with planned lifetime of decades. It's far better to rely on imperative programming concepts which are tested and trusted with experience grown from what, 50's or so. Sure, declarative programming is a nice toy, but that's all. I'm yet to see major companies investing millions, if not billions of capital on a system written in declarative languages. We all "know" functional programming "is the future", but yet nobody trusts their money and time on them. I still wonder if there are major commercial projects started with say Python or Ruby, or JavaScript which have planned lifetimes to 2030 and beyond.
- tbrownaw 14y ago
  I'm yet to see major companies investing millions, if not billions of capital on a system written in declarative languages. We all "know" functional programming "is the future", but yet nobody trusts their money and time on them. SQL is declarative. Erlang is kinda-sorta functional, and was developed specifically to run expensive high-uptime telecom systems.
  - zxcdw 14y ago
    ...both of which are domain specific languages, or developed as such. I really think C++ is going to gnaw "market share" from C in any low-level domains and fight back Go and other competitors in high-level systems programming domains thanks to it's recent C++11 standard and upcoming standard library extensions which being the transition of making it much more on-par with other modern languages. Bjarne Stroustrup(the language creator) has also hinted for much faster standardization process than last time around(when it took some 13 years to come up with a new standard), and would hope for a 5 year cycle instead, so perhaps C++16 is coming up next. Oh, and the standards committee is already working on it. The only major setback I see with C++11 in comparison to many other languages aimed for large-scale software development is it's very small standard library which completely lacks support for modern technologies such as hierarchical filesystems, sockets, XML and HTTP and so on. They are coming up later on, though. The core language is very solid and doesn't lack anything special. Yet, it's not any more "bloated" or complex by it's standard(in terms of page/line/word count) than say C# 3.0 or Java 7. tl;dr: I think many people think C++ is "old" or even dead and we need something more modern, yet now C++ evolves faster than ever and tries to meet that demand.
burntsushi 14y ago
I am a computer scientist that has performed research using Go because I love working with Go. I absolutely despise Java. So I'd say that your assessment is a bit off. I also look forward to trying Rust as well. Having algebraic data types makes me giddy.

tptacek 14y ago

What do Go and Dart have to do with each other, besides their origin at one of the largest tech companies in the world? Have you written much Go? What do you think of it in practice?

megaman821 14y ago
As languages, nothing. In design, their conservative nature.
- cmccabe 14y ago
  Go is not a conservative language. A conservative language would be something like D, which is mostly a clone of C++ with a few extra features tossed in. Go is a highly opinionated language with at least three big new ideas: * goroutines for concurrency ("Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating") * a new type system which is based on structural subtyping (some people have called this static duck typing). * use of return codes rather than exceptions for routine error conditions ("We don't want to encourage the conflation of errors and exceptions that occur in languages such as Java." See https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/iqAiKAwP6Ce https://plus.google.com/116810148281701144465/posts/iqAiKAwP... ) Just those three things are enough to make Go code look very from what came before. And I could go on-- things like the way go does namespaces and scoping are also very different. It's a different philosophy that leads to much better code, in my opinion at least, not dozens of gee-whiz features, which seems to be what the languages of the 1990s gave us and are continuing to give us.
  - pacala 14y ago
    > We don't want to encourage the conflation of errors and exceptions that occur in languages such as Java. I'm not getting this argument: checked exception == error runtime exception == panic
  - cygx 14y ago
    Except these big new ideas have been around for decades, some of them for nearly half a century. You're right that Go is not conservative, though, but retro, trying to mitigate the damage done by C and C++.
    - cmccabe 14y ago
      The ideas of Go are new to the mainstream, and at the end of the day, that's what matters. It's a programming language, not a PhD thesis.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    None of those three "big new ideas" are big or new. Go is incredibly conservative, primitive even. It takes a few tiny things like those you mentioned from languages that have had them for decades, but leaves out so much important stuff that the language is barely useful at all.

mtgx 14y ago

Maybe because that's what Google needs its own programmers to learn right now. Although, they should make a language that's meant to eventually replace Java/Dalvik for Android as well, and a language that's very easy to use and learn.

Lewisham 14y ago
Yeah, absolutely. Go and Dart really both fit needs of working with large software and giant scales. As I think they've both said independently, conservative design was considered a design bonus. You can see why as it gets teams up-to-speed quickly, is less off-putting to project managers, and is more likely to benefit from experience surrounding how to write effective, readable code forms. Stuff like Rust is awesome, but no-one yet knows what an Effective Rust book might look like, and you really need that sort of solidified design understanding to work. Code is write once, read hundreds of times, so that exciting wild west of "we don't have idioms yet" simply won't fly at a big company.
stcredzero 14y ago
One could automatically translate the Java API part of Android into Go? Also, it should be possible to write a VM for Go by extending Dalvik? I suspect that this territory is claimed by Dart, however.

kibwen 14y ago

Neither Mozilla nor Google are particularly keen to faff around designing languages for the hell of it. :) Google needed to ease the burden of hours-long Java/C++ compile times on massive projects. Hence Go. Mozilla needed a language that was as fast as C++, but safer and trivially parallelizable. Hence Rust. Beyond these goals, the fact that the rest of the world is excited for these languages is just gravy.

zobzu 14y ago
Well, that makes Mozilla's language goals a lot sexier to a lot of us i believe =P
nightski 14y ago
Seems weird. Google especially is a company that relies so much on programmer productivity & getting things right. Getting them wrong typically means lost revenue. I mean they spend crazy amounts of money on all kinds of projects that have no directly viable monetization scheme, yet for some reason you think it would be weird for them to explore programming languages? Odd.
neilk 14y ago
You attribute too much to these entities called "Google" and "Mozilla". They're made of people. No executive asks for a new programming language. However at some enlightened organizations, they are willing to let hackers explore radical approaches. At some point, in order for them to become "official" projects, the hackers have to align the language with the organization's goals. But the imprimatur of their creators is unmistakable. In any case, I doubt there is any plan to move everything in Google to Go. They're willing to let the creators and some enthusiasts play around with it, maybe deploy a few apps internally. But for Rust to be a success, Mozilla's going to have to use it extensively in their main product.
- kibwen 14y ago
  "No executive asks for a new programming language." Not that I think you're wrong, but I think the histories of Javascript and Ada stand as exceptions. :)

zxcdw 14y ago

I'm assuming you'd rather see them focus on declarative programming, because it seems to be the big thing among enthusiasts and hobbyists. Google works with software projects with planned lifetime of decades. It's far better to rely on imperative programming concepts which are tested and trusted with experience grown from what, 50's or so. Sure, declarative programming is a nice toy, but that's all. I'm yet to see major companies investing millions, if not billions of capital on a system written in declarative languages. We all "know" functional programming "is the future", but yet nobody trusts their money and time on them. I still wonder if there are major commercial projects started with say Python or Ruby, or JavaScript which have planned lifetimes to 2030 and beyond.

tbrownaw 14y ago
I'm yet to see major companies investing millions, if not billions of capital on a system written in declarative languages. We all "know" functional programming "is the future", but yet nobody trusts their money and time on them. SQL is declarative. Erlang is kinda-sorta functional, and was developed specifically to run expensive high-uptime telecom systems.
- zxcdw 14y ago
  ...both of which are domain specific languages, or developed as such. I really think C++ is going to gnaw "market share" from C in any low-level domains and fight back Go and other competitors in high-level systems programming domains thanks to it's recent C++11 standard and upcoming standard library extensions which being the transition of making it much more on-par with other modern languages. Bjarne Stroustrup(the language creator) has also hinted for much faster standardization process than last time around(when it took some 13 years to come up with a new standard), and would hope for a 5 year cycle instead, so perhaps C++16 is coming up next. Oh, and the standards committee is already working on it. The only major setback I see with C++11 in comparison to many other languages aimed for large-scale software development is it's very small standard library which completely lacks support for modern technologies such as hierarchical filesystems, sockets, XML and HTTP and so on. They are coming up later on, though. The core language is very solid and doesn't lack anything special. Yet, it's not any more "bloated" or complex by it's standard(in terms of page/line/word count) than say C# 3.0 or Java 7. tl;dr: I think many people think C++ is "old" or even dead and we need something more modern, yet now C++ evolves faster than ever and tries to meet that demand.

burntsushi 14y ago

I am a computer scientist that has performed research using Go because I love working with Go. I absolutely despise Java. So I'd say that your assessment is a bit off. I also look forward to trying Rust as well. Having algebraic data types makes me giddy.