5 ms·

When Go was first announced in 2009, I thought "this is a nice idea, but I really wish it had generics and non-nullable references". Then Rust was announced a f

by lambda 11y ago

When Go was first announced in 2009, I thought "this is a nice idea, but I really wish it had generics and non-nullable references". Then Rust was announced a few months later, and I thought "wow, this is what Go should have been." However, in the intervening time, Rust has diverged farther from Go. It no longer has green threads nor emphasizes message-passing based concurrency. In addition, Go was ready to use much sooner; by having a much simpler type system, and less ambitious concurrency story, Go has been ready to use and build up a library ecosystem for many years now, while Rust is only just now hitting stability to the point where you can write code and not have it break if you don't constantly keep it up to date with the latest nightly. So, I think that they are both valid strategies. There has been lots of good code written in languages which don't provide as many safety guarantees or as strong a type system as Rust has; it's not an absolute requirement for all code to be written with such guarantees. By staying simpler and not trying to solve as many problems, Go has been ready for production use for quite a lot longer, and I think that there are many things for which it is still simpler and easier to use. That said, I do prefer Rust now that it's actually hitting a stable and usable state. I wish it had been ready sooner, but that's the price you pay for needing a lot of time on iterating on how to make these stricter semantics actually usable in practice.

Pxtl 11y ago
Well, let's also not forget that a big factor in Go's success is Google. Google has much deeper pockets than Mozilla to build a language and infrastructure.
- danieldk 11y ago
  But it's not as if they threw a massive amount of manpower or budget at it. I think Go succeeded more by association (to Google) and the fact that it hits a sweet spot for many people - it produces native code, but does not have the complexity of C++ or the unsafety of C. I have written a fair bit of Go code. But I will switch to Rust without a second though once the ecosystem takes of. The lack of simple things like generics or algebraic data types in Go is jarring.
- kjksf 11y ago
  This meme really should die. It has never been true so there's nothing to forget. The number of full-time Rust people paid by Mozilla is roughly the same as number of Go people paid by Google. Mozilla is a wealthy company and while Google is even more wealthy, it doesn't mean that it spends all its money on Go. Both v8 and Dart are staffed with more people and Dart is not taking off the way Go is. People are trying to rationalize away the explosive popularity of Go with all sorts explanations, the "it's all because it's Google" being one of them. The simple explanation is: people use Go because it's a good language. That's the big factor in Go's success.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    But it's true. Google's association is a big factor in its success. It's not the only reason nor likely the biggest now but it was important at least at the beginning. The fact is that every week we hear about new programming languages. Almost none of them end up being widely used. Having someone like Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft etc behind it makes a big difference.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - Animats 11y ago
      It's not so much that Google promotes Go. It's that Google uses Go internally for production code. Thus, the compiler, and the library modules used for web-type services, are thoroughly exercised, and used by in-house people who can insist that bugs be fixed quickly. It took Go far fewer years to achieve stable libraries than, say, Python.
  - aikah 11y ago
    > Go because it's a good language. Go fits a niche and is good enough, for now. But Go as a language is seriously flawed, and its flaws will become more and more obvious as the language gets more popular. People can certainly understand Go made the choice of "minimalism". But minimalism doesn't mean the language shouldn't have features people really need. The infamous "You don't need that in Go" sentence will not fly that much longer,especially given how the Go team and community tries to answer Go short comings. The biggest insult to intelligence is that "go generate" feature.It's just embarrassing. Go for me is a missed opportunity. I still like it but I keep a close eye on alternatives that don't have their core library riddled with "interface{}" like types. Because there is a need for something simpler and safer than C,that is easily accessible to "script kiddies",that is fast,that has easy concurrency, that compiles to machine code,that has type safety,that isn't tied to windows, in order for people to produce executables that can easily be distributed or concurrent servers. Whatever language succeeds in that niche will be the biggest language of the next 10/20 years. Mark my words.
- peterfirefly 11y ago
  The biggest factor probably was that Rob Pike had basically been prototyping the language for 20 years. (But google's name certainly helped.)
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    Not to take anything away from your comment on this being a language that has been brewing for years, but people really should give Robert Griesemer more credit for his influence on the language design. I know he's the least publically visible of the three, but IIRC godoc and gofmt are mostly his babies. After getting used to those I think I miss them more in other languages than I miss the concurrency.
    - Supermighty 11y ago
      Well said. Rob Pike is explicit about early Go development; everything that went into Go was agreed upon by Robert, Ken, and Rob. If all three didn't agree it didn't go in.

by lambda 11y ago

Pxtl 11y ago

Well, let's also not forget that a big factor in Go's success is Google. Google has much deeper pockets than Mozilla to build a language and infrastructure.

danieldk 11y ago
But it's not as if they threw a massive amount of manpower or budget at it. I think Go succeeded more by association (to Google) and the fact that it hits a sweet spot for many people - it produces native code, but does not have the complexity of C++ or the unsafety of C. I have written a fair bit of Go code. But I will switch to Rust without a second though once the ecosystem takes of. The lack of simple things like generics or algebraic data types in Go is jarring.
kjksf 11y ago
This meme really should die. It has never been true so there's nothing to forget. The number of full-time Rust people paid by Mozilla is roughly the same as number of Go people paid by Google. Mozilla is a wealthy company and while Google is even more wealthy, it doesn't mean that it spends all its money on Go. Both v8 and Dart are staffed with more people and Dart is not taking off the way Go is. People are trying to rationalize away the explosive popularity of Go with all sorts explanations, the "it's all because it's Google" being one of them. The simple explanation is: people use Go because it's a good language. That's the big factor in Go's success.
- threeseed 11y ago
  But it's true. Google's association is a big factor in its success. It's not the only reason nor likely the biggest now but it was important at least at the beginning. The fact is that every week we hear about new programming languages. Almost none of them end up being widely used. Having someone like Google, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft etc behind it makes a big difference.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Animats 11y ago
    It's not so much that Google promotes Go. It's that Google uses Go internally for production code. Thus, the compiler, and the library modules used for web-type services, are thoroughly exercised, and used by in-house people who can insist that bugs be fixed quickly. It took Go far fewer years to achieve stable libraries than, say, Python.
- aikah 11y ago
  > Go because it's a good language. Go fits a niche and is good enough, for now. But Go as a language is seriously flawed, and its flaws will become more and more obvious as the language gets more popular. People can certainly understand Go made the choice of "minimalism". But minimalism doesn't mean the language shouldn't have features people really need. The infamous "You don't need that in Go" sentence will not fly that much longer,especially given how the Go team and community tries to answer Go short comings. The biggest insult to intelligence is that "go generate" feature.It's just embarrassing. Go for me is a missed opportunity. I still like it but I keep a close eye on alternatives that don't have their core library riddled with "interface{}" like types. Because there is a need for something simpler and safer than C,that is easily accessible to "script kiddies",that is fast,that has easy concurrency, that compiles to machine code,that has type safety,that isn't tied to windows, in order for people to produce executables that can easily be distributed or concurrent servers. Whatever language succeeds in that niche will be the biggest language of the next 10/20 years. Mark my words.
peterfirefly 11y ago
The biggest factor probably was that Rob Pike had basically been prototyping the language for 20 years. (But google's name certainly helped.)
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  Not to take anything away from your comment on this being a language that has been brewing for years, but people really should give Robert Griesemer more credit for his influence on the language design. I know he's the least publically visible of the three, but IIRC godoc and gofmt are mostly his babies. After getting used to those I think I miss them more in other languages than I miss the concurrency.
  - Supermighty 11y ago
    Well said. Rob Pike is explicit about early Go development; everything that went into Go was agreed upon by Robert, Ken, and Rob. If all three didn't agree it didn't go in.