5 ms·

I like Go, but I always thought that was a ridiculous selling point. Just look at your own comment: if Googlers are picking up Go, it must have been for other

by sltkr 13y ago

I like Go, but I always thought that was a ridiculous selling point. Just look at your own comment: if Googlers are picking up Go, it must have been for other reasons than build speed, considering they have a compile farm at their disposal that can build millions of lines of C++ code (before or after preprocessing, I wonder?) in mere seconds. I have a suspicion that if you ask people who used Go why they chose that language over the many other available options, almost none will say "because the compiler is fast!"

voidlogic 13y ago
I agree. I was approaching from the angle of being amused that they obviously put a lot of work into making C++ compile reasonably fast when they created a language that, amongst other things, addresses that issue by addressing the actual causes of slowness (as opposed to some giant cluster). I agree that for very few people compilation speed is "their" winning Go feature. (Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run)
- sltkr 13y ago
  I always thought of the Go team as mostly outsiders coming from Plan 9 who were being sponsored by Google, but otherwise aren't really an integral part of the company (but then again, I don't know much about Google's internal organization). > Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run `go run` isn't that fast, really. A simple "hello world" takes 320ms on my system, while the equivalent in C takes 40ms, and C++ takes 270ms. Honestly I can't of a single use case where I think Go's compiler speed matters. And again: that's coming from someone who likes Go for basically every other reason.
  - voidlogic 13y ago
    >I always thought of the Go team as mostly outsiders coming from Plan 9 who were being sponsored by Google, but otherwise aren't really an integral part of the company (but then again, I don't know much about Google's internal organization). Well Rob and Ken are from Bell/Plan 9, but Robert is from Java HotSpot. My understanding is they were allowed to take what was their "20%" side project and Go full-time once it showed promise for addressing Google's language problems. >`go run` isn't that fast, really. A simple "hello world" takes 320ms on my system, while the equivalent in C takes 40ms, and C++ takes 270ms. Shouldn't you be comparing Go to Python, Perl or PHP in the context of "go run"? Also, benchmarking "Hello World" programs is not usually a very meaningful activity in any context. > And again: that's coming from someone who likes Go for basically every other reason. I like Go too and I think we agree that the compile speed, while nice, is just gravy when it comes to what Go has to offer.

by sltkr 13y ago

voidlogic 13y ago

I agree. I was approaching from the angle of being amused that they obviously put a lot of work into making C++ compile reasonably fast when they created a language that, amongst other things, addresses that issue by addressing the actual causes of slowness (as opposed to some giant cluster). I agree that for very few people compilation speed is "their" winning Go feature. (Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run)

sltkr 13y ago
I always thought of the Go team as mostly outsiders coming from Plan 9 who were being sponsored by Google, but otherwise aren't really an integral part of the company (but then again, I don't know much about Google's internal organization). > Although it is handy for situations were you want to use Go like a scripting language using go run `go run` isn't that fast, really. A simple "hello world" takes 320ms on my system, while the equivalent in C takes 40ms, and C++ takes 270ms. Honestly I can't of a single use case where I think Go's compiler speed matters. And again: that's coming from someone who likes Go for basically every other reason.
- voidlogic 13y ago
  >I always thought of the Go team as mostly outsiders coming from Plan 9 who were being sponsored by Google, but otherwise aren't really an integral part of the company (but then again, I don't know much about Google's internal organization). Well Rob and Ken are from Bell/Plan 9, but Robert is from Java HotSpot. My understanding is they were allowed to take what was their "20%" side project and Go full-time once it showed promise for addressing Google's language problems. >`go run` isn't that fast, really. A simple "hello world" takes 320ms on my system, while the equivalent in C takes 40ms, and C++ takes 270ms. Shouldn't you be comparing Go to Python, Perl or PHP in the context of "go run"? Also, benchmarking "Hello World" programs is not usually a very meaningful activity in any context. > And again: that's coming from someone who likes Go for basically every other reason. I like Go too and I think we agree that the compile speed, while nice, is just gravy when it comes to what Go has to offer.