10 ms·

No, I get that you want to filter out boring engineers. It's just unfortunate that it seems the only way our industry can do this is by changing up the tools an

by hueving 12y ago

No, I get that you want to filter out boring engineers. It's just unfortunate that it seems the only way our industry can do this is by changing up the tools and seeing who makes it through. Some of the smartest engineers I know are not interested in go because they think it solved the wrong problems and prefer rust for something new.

robmccoll 12y ago
I've been writing in Go at work nearly every day for the past year. I think that of the problems both Go and Rust attempt to solve, Rust solves them better in a technical and academic sense. As someone who prefers C and C++ over Python and Java, I personally would rather use Rust, but I have to say that Go strikes a great balance for general-purpose use. It is as fast to develop and as flexible and extendable as Python. Similar performance to Java but with much less code, better interoperability, and a more robust standard library. More features than C without the needless complexity of C++. Entirely too opinionated and the build system and dependency management are 80% solutions / hacks, but for the most part you can work around them. Most importantly, I think Go can be easily picked up and used by C, C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Python, C#, Objective-C, XYZ, ETC programmers alike with very little learning curve (some more than others perhaps). I think with Rust, you are going to have a hard time training someone who has depended on GC for so long that they have to be explicit about the ownership and transfer of ownership of memory and that it's elegant and cool and performant to do so. You are going to have trouble explaining traits and composability and the syntax around it to someone who is used to using more verbose syntax to implement complicated inheritance trees. Pattern matching and enums are fantastic, but also foreign to most of the programming public. This is why Go is spreading - good middle ground for productivity and performance, easy to pick up, seemingly bright future, Google backing, good documentation (no doc is perfect - Sphinx is frequently not great, Javadoc is terrible, Doxygen is meh, MSDN is overgrown with cruft - but Godoc is decent), etc.
- voltagex_ 12y ago
  Is there a good (say, produced by JetBrains) IDE for Go yet? Edit: http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/?idea&id=5047 http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/?idea&id=5047
  - look_lookatme 12y ago
    It's worth noting that a number of JetBrains employees seem to be working on this plugin every day [1]. I suspect we'll see a proper JetBrain Go IDE before too long. [1] https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/commits/master https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/co...
  - cyri 12y ago
    I'll work with the latest commits from https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/commits/master https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/co... every day (fresh compiled) and it is getting better and better! Those guys are doing an awesome job. There is not yet a need for a Go-specific IDE by JetBrain.
    - frik 12y ago
      Does it support Go 1.4? In Jan/February it was still only compatible with previous Go versions - the stable release.
      - cyri 12y ago
        I only work with Go 1.4 :-) I was aware that the plugin didn't support for a long time the new Go structure. But with the overall refactoring it works now perfect.
  - YZF 12y ago
    I use Eclipse with the Goclipse plug-in. I still have the command prompt on the side for some stuff but the plug-in covers a fair bit of what you need to get done... http://goclipse.github.io/ http://goclipse.github.io/
  - robmccoll 12y ago
    Asking the wrong person for that one - I just use Vim ;-) I do use a few of the Go scripts (https://github.com/robmccoll/dotfiles https://github.com/robmccoll/dotfiles). There are some really nice ones (continuous build, syntax checking, continuous testing, etc), but most of what I work on has longer build times due to linking in a good bit of C.
- pron 12y ago
  > Similar performance to Java but with much less code, better interoperability, and a more robust standard library. I disagree on all points. 1. The similar performance to Java is usually in small benchmarks. Once the program grows, the difference in quality of the GC and code generation starts to show (in favor of Java, of course). 2. Less code? I've seen Go programs in the wild that are indeed shorter than their Java counterparts, but that's almost invariably because the Go code is less "careful" (less attention to error handling, logging, monitoring, maintainability etc.) But when you compare programs that actually do the same thing, I find that the code size is similar, with Go winning fewer characters and Java 8 fewer lines. 3. Interoperability is, IMO, much better in Java, where you can interoperate with both C as well as JVM languages (including JVM ports of Python, Ruby and R); for Go it's just C. 4. As to the standard library -- especially when it comes to concurrent data structures -- there are few if any languages out there with implementations of as high a quality as Java, and the difference between the variety and quality of available third-party libraries is beyond comparison. All in all, I find Go and Java to be quite similar, and the choice between them boils down to the runtime. I reach for Go when I need small command-line programs where JVM warmup is unacceptable and static linking to a native executable is a plus, and Java for long-running, "important" server apps, where top performance and deep monitoring (and sometimes hot code swapping) are necessary.
  - fauigerzigerk 12y ago
    I agree that Go and Java are very similar indeed. Without goroutines, Go would be little more than a rewind of Java to a moment before J2EE happened. A major motivation for both languages was to take dangerous weapons out of the hands of mediocre programmers (or programmers made mediocre by being forced into large and ever changing teams). But I have to disagree on performance. What kills Java performance is memory consumption and the way memory is laid out. It has always been the number one killer. It killed Applets. It killed Java on the desktop. And it makes Java a bad choice for most server side infrastructure. I predict that Go is going to wipe out Java for that latter kind of task within 5 years if not less. Memory consumption is what constrains performance for most tasks. That's why most benchmarks are entirely irrelevant. Java's creators made two huge mistakes: 1) Throwing out structured value types, which is the root cause for Java's insatiable appetite for memory. 20 years of garbage collection research were unable to compensate for the damage done by not having structured value types. 2) Throwing out so many (supposedly too complex and too dangerous) meta programming features that everything meta had to be built around the language. Trading complexity at the language level for a much more unsound form of complexity on the runtime and tooling side is what caused the J2EE disaster. Go's creators avoided the first mistake but they are busy repeating the second one with even greater determination.
bladecatcher 12y ago
D language is also worth taking a look at. It's a very smart language designed for systems programming.
- FraaJad 12y ago
  I'm afraid, it will be never be "cool" :(
jshen 12y ago
Smart companies want engineers that are focused on solving their challenges, not those that prioritize the tool they use over the real goal.
- optimusclimb 12y ago
  http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
  - jshen 12y ago
    I read that back when it was first published, believed it, and built a few teams using it's philosophy. I've also been at a few big companies that haven't followed it's direction. In my experience it doesn't work unless you have a small team and a small company and even then you are often left with fickle programmers who leave when the next fad comes along because your company can't justify rewriting its systems with the latest fad tech.
    - optimusclimb 12y ago
      Wouldn't you say lisp was the opposite of a fad at the time when PG wrote that article? It's been a long time since I read it, but in Microserfs, the classic "VC" or "Money" guy describes how you can drive around the Valley on a Sunday and predict the success of companies by how many cars there are in the parking lots. Most conventional wisdom these days is that if you have to work 80-90+ hour mega weeks you're doing it wrong, but I think that the analogy might be that if the team is using an interesting technology stack, there's a higher chance the engineers there are of higher caliber (as they're interested in pushing themselves to use a newer technology.) Thoughts?
      - jshen 12y ago
        "but I think that the analogy might be that if the team is using an interesting technology stack, there's a higher chance the engineers there are of higher caliber" My experience doesn't support this for a few reasons. One of the main reasons is what I alluded to before, the people interested in "interesting" tech stacks are fadish, even if the tech isn't. In 2-3 years, your "interesting" tech stack becomes "uninteresting" or worse, a bad idea. I remember when java was "interesting" then it was php, then python, then ruby on rails, then scala, clojure, haskel, then backbone, then node.js, then angular, then react, then go and rust, then ....
nickysielicki 12y ago
When you first look at go, you might think, "gee, this language sucks. What is this? A compiled language with pointers, structs, that's not object oriented? And it has garbage collection? WTF. Okay, so this is meant to replace C/C++?" Nope. Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. Go is a langauge for people somewhat comfortable in low level langauges that want to high level things in a somewhat performant way. The older alternative is probably python. Rust is a language for people moderately comfortable in low level languages that want to do moderately low level things in a complex way. The older alternative is C++. C is a language for people very comfortable in low level langauges that want to do very low level things. The older alternative is assembly.
- danieldk 12y ago
  Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. I disagree. I think in many (but not all) use cases, Go and Rust are direct competitors. However, they embody a different philosophy. It's New Jersey (worse is better) vs. MIT style all over again. One can read Gabriel's[1] descriptions of both styles and they map exactly to Go and Rust. Given Go's heritage this is, of course, not surprising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
  - nickysielicki 12y ago
    I agree that their philosophies are very different, but I still hold that their use cases do not align so much. For me at least, go has mostly taken the role that scripting languages sit in. I surely wouldn't want to write scripts in rust. What are some of the use cases that you think they share?
- mimighost 12y ago
  Agree. Go is made for web/distributed programming: builtin concurrency, battery-included library with great support for http utils, including a production-ready server and other stuff like RPC. And the distribution is just so easy. For a Pythoner, Go almost solves all my pain points for python, notably the lack of support for real multi-threading so that for long running task we have to turn into processes based 3rd party library like celery/rq with a message queue as intermediate layer, while comes with a relative familiar favor of syntax. Go is a pragmatic minimalist language, with limited but cohesive set of features that stays at its core. I don't know rust very well, but from what I gather from HN, looks like that it aims to be a more comprehensive solution rather than 'opinionated' one in case of Go.

by hueving 12y ago

robmccoll 12y ago

I've been writing in Go at work nearly every day for the past year. I think that of the problems both Go and Rust attempt to solve, Rust solves them better in a technical and academic sense. As someone who prefers C and C++ over Python and Java, I personally would rather use Rust, but I have to say that Go strikes a great balance for general-purpose use. It is as fast to develop and as flexible and extendable as Python. Similar performance to Java but with much less code, better interoperability, and a more robust standard library. More features than C without the needless complexity of C++. Entirely too opinionated and the build system and dependency management are 80% solutions / hacks, but for the most part you can work around them. Most importantly, I think Go can be easily picked up and used by C, C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Python, C#, Objective-C, XYZ, ETC programmers alike with very little learning curve (some more than others perhaps). I think with Rust, you are going to have a hard time training someone who has depended on GC for so long that they have to be explicit about the ownership and transfer of ownership of memory and that it's elegant and cool and performant to do so. You are going to have trouble explaining traits and composability and the syntax around it to someone who is used to using more verbose syntax to implement complicated inheritance trees. Pattern matching and enums are fantastic, but also foreign to most of the programming public. This is why Go is spreading - good middle ground for productivity and performance, easy to pick up, seemingly bright future, Google backing, good documentation (no doc is perfect - Sphinx is frequently not great, Javadoc is terrible, Doxygen is meh, MSDN is overgrown with cruft - but Godoc is decent), etc.

voltagex_ 12y ago
Is there a good (say, produced by JetBrains) IDE for Go yet? Edit: http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/?idea&id=5047 http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/?idea&id=5047
- look_lookatme 12y ago
  It's worth noting that a number of JetBrains employees seem to be working on this plugin every day [1]. I suspect we'll see a proper JetBrain Go IDE before too long. [1] https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/commits/master https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/co...
- cyri 12y ago
  I'll work with the latest commits from https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/commits/master https://github.com/go-lang-plugin-org/go-lang-idea-plugin/co... every day (fresh compiled) and it is getting better and better! Those guys are doing an awesome job. There is not yet a need for a Go-specific IDE by JetBrain.
  - frik 12y ago
    Does it support Go 1.4? In Jan/February it was still only compatible with previous Go versions - the stable release.
    - cyri 12y ago
      I only work with Go 1.4 :-) I was aware that the plugin didn't support for a long time the new Go structure. But with the overall refactoring it works now perfect.
- YZF 12y ago
  I use Eclipse with the Goclipse plug-in. I still have the command prompt on the side for some stuff but the plug-in covers a fair bit of what you need to get done... http://goclipse.github.io/ http://goclipse.github.io/
- robmccoll 12y ago
  Asking the wrong person for that one - I just use Vim ;-) I do use a few of the Go scripts (https://github.com/robmccoll/dotfiles https://github.com/robmccoll/dotfiles). There are some really nice ones (continuous build, syntax checking, continuous testing, etc), but most of what I work on has longer build times due to linking in a good bit of C.
pron 12y ago
> Similar performance to Java but with much less code, better interoperability, and a more robust standard library. I disagree on all points. 1. The similar performance to Java is usually in small benchmarks. Once the program grows, the difference in quality of the GC and code generation starts to show (in favor of Java, of course). 2. Less code? I've seen Go programs in the wild that are indeed shorter than their Java counterparts, but that's almost invariably because the Go code is less "careful" (less attention to error handling, logging, monitoring, maintainability etc.) But when you compare programs that actually do the same thing, I find that the code size is similar, with Go winning fewer characters and Java 8 fewer lines. 3. Interoperability is, IMO, much better in Java, where you can interoperate with both C as well as JVM languages (including JVM ports of Python, Ruby and R); for Go it's just C. 4. As to the standard library -- especially when it comes to concurrent data structures -- there are few if any languages out there with implementations of as high a quality as Java, and the difference between the variety and quality of available third-party libraries is beyond comparison. All in all, I find Go and Java to be quite similar, and the choice between them boils down to the runtime. I reach for Go when I need small command-line programs where JVM warmup is unacceptable and static linking to a native executable is a plus, and Java for long-running, "important" server apps, where top performance and deep monitoring (and sometimes hot code swapping) are necessary.
- fauigerzigerk 12y ago
  I agree that Go and Java are very similar indeed. Without goroutines, Go would be little more than a rewind of Java to a moment before J2EE happened. A major motivation for both languages was to take dangerous weapons out of the hands of mediocre programmers (or programmers made mediocre by being forced into large and ever changing teams). But I have to disagree on performance. What kills Java performance is memory consumption and the way memory is laid out. It has always been the number one killer. It killed Applets. It killed Java on the desktop. And it makes Java a bad choice for most server side infrastructure. I predict that Go is going to wipe out Java for that latter kind of task within 5 years if not less. Memory consumption is what constrains performance for most tasks. That's why most benchmarks are entirely irrelevant. Java's creators made two huge mistakes: 1) Throwing out structured value types, which is the root cause for Java's insatiable appetite for memory. 20 years of garbage collection research were unable to compensate for the damage done by not having structured value types. 2) Throwing out so many (supposedly too complex and too dangerous) meta programming features that everything meta had to be built around the language. Trading complexity at the language level for a much more unsound form of complexity on the runtime and tooling side is what caused the J2EE disaster. Go's creators avoided the first mistake but they are busy repeating the second one with even greater determination.

bladecatcher 12y ago

D language is also worth taking a look at. It's a very smart language designed for systems programming.

FraaJad 12y ago
I'm afraid, it will be never be "cool" :(

jshen 12y ago

Smart companies want engineers that are focused on solving their challenges, not those that prioritize the tool they use over the real goal.

optimusclimb 12y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- jshen 12y ago
  I read that back when it was first published, believed it, and built a few teams using it's philosophy. I've also been at a few big companies that haven't followed it's direction. In my experience it doesn't work unless you have a small team and a small company and even then you are often left with fickle programmers who leave when the next fad comes along because your company can't justify rewriting its systems with the latest fad tech.
  - optimusclimb 12y ago
    Wouldn't you say lisp was the opposite of a fad at the time when PG wrote that article? It's been a long time since I read it, but in Microserfs, the classic "VC" or "Money" guy describes how you can drive around the Valley on a Sunday and predict the success of companies by how many cars there are in the parking lots. Most conventional wisdom these days is that if you have to work 80-90+ hour mega weeks you're doing it wrong, but I think that the analogy might be that if the team is using an interesting technology stack, there's a higher chance the engineers there are of higher caliber (as they're interested in pushing themselves to use a newer technology.) Thoughts?
    - jshen 12y ago
      "but I think that the analogy might be that if the team is using an interesting technology stack, there's a higher chance the engineers there are of higher caliber" My experience doesn't support this for a few reasons. One of the main reasons is what I alluded to before, the people interested in "interesting" tech stacks are fadish, even if the tech isn't. In 2-3 years, your "interesting" tech stack becomes "uninteresting" or worse, a bad idea. I remember when java was "interesting" then it was php, then python, then ruby on rails, then scala, clojure, haskel, then backbone, then node.js, then angular, then react, then go and rust, then ....

nickysielicki 12y ago

When you first look at go, you might think, "gee, this language sucks. What is this? A compiled language with pointers, structs, that's not object oriented? And it has garbage collection? WTF. Okay, so this is meant to replace C/C++?" Nope. Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. Go is a langauge for people somewhat comfortable in low level langauges that want to high level things in a somewhat performant way. The older alternative is probably python. Rust is a language for people moderately comfortable in low level languages that want to do moderately low level things in a complex way. The older alternative is C++. C is a language for people very comfortable in low level langauges that want to do very low level things. The older alternative is assembly.

danieldk 12y ago
Go and Rust are almost entirely orthogonal in their best use cases. I disagree. I think in many (but not all) use cases, Go and Rust are direct competitors. However, they embody a different philosophy. It's New Jersey (worse is better) vs. MIT style all over again. One can read Gabriel's[1] descriptions of both styles and they map exactly to Go and Rust. Given Go's heritage this is, of course, not surprising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- nickysielicki 12y ago
  I agree that their philosophies are very different, but I still hold that their use cases do not align so much. For me at least, go has mostly taken the role that scripting languages sit in. I surely wouldn't want to write scripts in rust. What are some of the use cases that you think they share?
mimighost 12y ago
Agree. Go is made for web/distributed programming: builtin concurrency, battery-included library with great support for http utils, including a production-ready server and other stuff like RPC. And the distribution is just so easy. For a Pythoner, Go almost solves all my pain points for python, notably the lack of support for real multi-threading so that for long running task we have to turn into processes based 3rd party library like celery/rq with a message queue as intermediate layer, while comes with a relative familiar favor of syntax. Go is a pragmatic minimalist language, with limited but cohesive set of features that stays at its core. I don't know rust very well, but from what I gather from HN, looks like that it aims to be a more comprehensive solution rather than 'opinionated' one in case of Go.