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Go isn't (and probably will never be) a viable alternative for most of the use cases where you'd want C/C++: 1. Embedded, real-time, kernel: As a GC language w

Go isn't (and probably will never be) a viable alternative for most of the use cases where you'd want C/C++: 1. Embedded, real-time, kernel: As a GC language which is not meant to write close-to-the-metal code and produces rather bloated binaries (especially compared to C), Go has no chance here. This trinity is still very much the sole territory of C where even C++ seldom dares to tread. 2. Truly cross-platform (not just Windows/Linux/Mac) performance-sensitive libraries that need to be callable (using bindings) from a wide range of programming languages (including C). This is a very common but often neglected class of software where C/C++ reign supreme. Libraries need lots of flexibility in terms of ABI support (e.g. support linking with different C stdlibs) and deployment (e.g. dynamic libraries, which Go, AFAIK, still doesn't support). 3. Complex and lightweight GUI apps with high performance: This is the main class of application mentioned in the blog post. While there are some Go bindings to popular GUI libraries such as Qt and GTK, I'm not sure if their mature enough. Using Qt directly from C++ still seems like the path of least resistance to me. As for lightweight apps, Go apparently still has some work to do about the binary sizes. 4. Web Servers: This is where Go should shine! Programming a concurrent web server using Goroutines should be a breeze, and considering most web servers are still written in C, we would be relieved of the nightmare that is string manipulation in C. But right now, there's still doesn't seem to be any Go equivalent of nginx in development. Go is probably getting mature enough, but I think that if actually squeezing every last ounce of performance is your goal, it still can't beat nginx. For instance, nginx employs many tricks to optimize its memory allocation pattern specifically for the task it was meant to do, and I find it hard to believe that any one size fits all GC, no matter how intelligent, can get the same performance.

jerf 12y ago
" But right now, there's still doesn't seem to be any Go equivalent of nginx in development. Go is probably getting mature enough, but I think that if actually squeezing every last ounce of performance is your goal, it still can't beat nginx." There's no nginx in development because the built-in net/http library is actually pretty close to it already. Nginx beats it, but only by something like 25-50%, and if you compare the nginx source code to the net/http source code you'll see why nginx is going to likely retain that lead and Go isn't interested in the code quality tradeoff it would take to catch up to nginx. If you ever need an example of C used as "portable assembler", cite the core loop code of nginx.

jerf 12y ago

" But right now, there's still doesn't seem to be any Go equivalent of nginx in development. Go is probably getting mature enough, but I think that if actually squeezing every last ounce of performance is your goal, it still can't beat nginx." There's no nginx in development because the built-in net/http library is actually pretty close to it already. Nginx beats it, but only by something like 25-50%, and if you compare the nginx source code to the net/http source code you'll see why nginx is going to likely retain that lead and Go isn't interested in the code quality tradeoff it would take to catch up to nginx. If you ever need an example of C used as "portable assembler", cite the core loop code of nginx.