7 ms·

Go is... fundamentally different than most runtimes? Probably. Better? Maybe. Better than the comparable ones? I think it's losing that war. You don't even need

by smosher 14y ago

Go is... fundamentally different than most runtimes? Probably. Better? Maybe. Better than the comparable ones? I think it's losing that war. You don't even need a special runtime, it can help, but I think the amount it helps is overstated in Go's case. Concurrency isn't that hard in practice. If you're willing to forgo automatic multiplexing Perl will give you Go's concurrency model in a library written ten years ago, and it works as naturally as it does in Go. Python seems to have similarly good support but it probably doesn't look much like Go. I'm not sure what Lua's doing these days, but in the past I've found concurrency dead simple. If you happen to be writing C, time-slicing the work isn't even that hard. If you know enough about Go's concurrency to tell whether a single goroutine will cause its scheduler to deadlock all by itself, you can easily write concurrent programs in all these languages. I know this will be a controversial claim, but all of these solutions are easier to reason about than Go. Usually not by much, and it has primarily to do with the nature of its multi-threading support, but that's just the concurrency model being weakened by the support for convenient parallelism. There is a case where Go is best: when you like writing Go more than the others. You can guarantee a little less about concurrency than most, but at least you can usually guarantee more about types than most. If you like writing Go you will either luckily avoid the problems or develop habits that prevent you from producing concurrency bugs, possibly even without realizing it.

rektide 14y ago
Go's standard lib is built around it's communications and concurrency primitives. Sure one can extend other languages with new capabilities to take them into Go's realm, but that implies a movement away from stock standard core, whereas Go users, at their core, share a common massively concurrent message passing beast of a runtime and a concurrency friendly standard library that they are all unified behind. One will never mobilize behind a concurrent library in the kind of ways doing it up front will accomplish. Go has a large community of practitioners all writing massively concurrent code. That is huge and has never been done before. But let's go look at patterning: look at Node: everything is hinged around re-using Node's core patterns, callbacks and every now and then slower events. There is promises work abound, but it's not used heavily: indeed it'd be hard to, with intermodule work, because A) it's not the standard lib B) nor are promises standardized. People seem to prefer something I loath- the horrible Async library- which gives them a bunch of composition tools to make worse the awful awful crime that is callbacks: because callbacks are what Node is, people pick up tools to do it more, to a further extreme, rather than going to the foundation & reshaping the landscape. (PS: Callbacks are A) awful B) actually & entirely the right decision.) I was reasonably seriously into Perl, but I don't know what perl CSP style library you seem to be alluding to that A) you seem to indicate people used & B) got on par with Go 10 years ago. But I'm interested to hear of it! <3 me some CSP.
- smosher 14y ago
  > but that implies a movement away from stock standard core [...] never [etc.] I wouldn't have said anything if I didn't disagree very strongly with these sentiments (see below about growing your own CSP/etc, and later about Coro in particular.) But first, about Node: let's not look at Node (unless you really want to, but as long as you understand it has nothing to do with my comment.) Problems with JS are usually founded on people complaining they don't like callbacks (translation: "Go is better because I like it better"—in which case please dispense with the cognitive dissonance and just be honest and say as much♯) and are inapplicable to other most other languages regardless. ♯Edit: That's not necessarily directed specifically at you, but people often vilify every aspect of things they don't like. I'm not convinced that's what you're trying to say about JS. I don't view concurrency as this mysterious thing, if you know CSP you can write it in any language, usually fairly naturally. In languages like JavaScript, Perl, Tcl, you can even make it look like it was already part of the language, tucking away calls to the scheduler so the user doesn't need to write them explicitly (heck, you can do that part in C... but... don't), like in Go (save for pure-computation loops, also just like in Go.) All Go really does over the general case is adding implicit calls to the scheduler (not nicely possible in some languages) and treats the scheduler as a second-class primitive feature. To go on about a unified implementation reaches my ears much like an argument that you'd better use `for` loops and never `map`s (guess what you can't do in Go.) I wasn't going to bring this up, but since you're familiar with Perl you will be less likely to assume limitations. The lib is Coro. People do use it, but it is controversial because of #dramaintheperlcommunity (#whatelseisnews.) I don't know how popular it is overall, but if popularity is an issue for you let me know because it's a stupid argument to get into and I don't want to have it without realizing it. People rarely pay attention to concurrency anyway, but it's been around forever. It is not a parallel library, for which I am thankful. (It's not incompatible with parallelism, and importantly: it doesn't make Go's mistakes in that area.) It amounts to a scheduler, facilities for spawning coroutines, wrappers to make calling the scheduler implicit (eg. at IO points), do async IO and every single thing you would need to make Perl automatically do the things Go automatically does. It will look exactly like Perl with Go's concurrency model, in broad strokes you do the same things, in the fine details you use Perl modules and methods and a new keyword or two.

by smosher 14y ago

rektide 14y ago

Go's standard lib is built around it's communications and concurrency primitives. Sure one can extend other languages with new capabilities to take them into Go's realm, but that implies a movement away from stock standard core, whereas Go users, at their core, share a common massively concurrent message passing beast of a runtime and a concurrency friendly standard library that they are all unified behind. One will never mobilize behind a concurrent library in the kind of ways doing it up front will accomplish. Go has a large community of practitioners all writing massively concurrent code. That is huge and has never been done before. But let's go look at patterning: look at Node: everything is hinged around re-using Node's core patterns, callbacks and every now and then slower events. There is promises work abound, but it's not used heavily: indeed it'd be hard to, with intermodule work, because A) it's not the standard lib B) nor are promises standardized. People seem to prefer something I loath- the horrible Async library- which gives them a bunch of composition tools to make worse the awful awful crime that is callbacks: because callbacks are what Node is, people pick up tools to do it more, to a further extreme, rather than going to the foundation & reshaping the landscape. (PS: Callbacks are A) awful B) actually & entirely the right decision.) I was reasonably seriously into Perl, but I don't know what perl CSP style library you seem to be alluding to that A) you seem to indicate people used & B) got on par with Go 10 years ago. But I'm interested to hear of it! <3 me some CSP.

smosher 14y ago
> but that implies a movement away from stock standard core [...] never [etc.] I wouldn't have said anything if I didn't disagree very strongly with these sentiments (see below about growing your own CSP/etc, and later about Coro in particular.) But first, about Node: let's not look at Node (unless you really want to, but as long as you understand it has nothing to do with my comment.) Problems with JS are usually founded on people complaining they don't like callbacks (translation: "Go is better because I like it better"—in which case please dispense with the cognitive dissonance and just be honest and say as much♯) and are inapplicable to other most other languages regardless. ♯Edit: That's not necessarily directed specifically at you, but people often vilify every aspect of things they don't like. I'm not convinced that's what you're trying to say about JS. I don't view concurrency as this mysterious thing, if you know CSP you can write it in any language, usually fairly naturally. In languages like JavaScript, Perl, Tcl, you can even make it look like it was already part of the language, tucking away calls to the scheduler so the user doesn't need to write them explicitly (heck, you can do that part in C... but... don't), like in Go (save for pure-computation loops, also just like in Go.) All Go really does over the general case is adding implicit calls to the scheduler (not nicely possible in some languages) and treats the scheduler as a second-class primitive feature. To go on about a unified implementation reaches my ears much like an argument that you'd better use `for` loops and never `map`s (guess what you can't do in Go.) I wasn't going to bring this up, but since you're familiar with Perl you will be less likely to assume limitations. The lib is Coro. People do use it, but it is controversial because of #dramaintheperlcommunity (#whatelseisnews.) I don't know how popular it is overall, but if popularity is an issue for you let me know because it's a stupid argument to get into and I don't want to have it without realizing it. People rarely pay attention to concurrency anyway, but it's been around forever. It is not a parallel library, for which I am thankful. (It's not incompatible with parallelism, and importantly: it doesn't make Go's mistakes in that area.) It amounts to a scheduler, facilities for spawning coroutines, wrappers to make calling the scheduler implicit (eg. at IO points), do async IO and every single thing you would need to make Perl automatically do the things Go automatically does. It will look exactly like Perl with Go's concurrency model, in broad strokes you do the same things, in the fine details you use Perl modules and methods and a new keyword or two.