Why you should use Go

I can’t stand go. It is painful and annoying to write compared to almost any modern language. Yes it’s simple, and makes it easy to write concurrent programs using one particular style of concurrency, which are about the only good things anyone can say about it.

The proponents of go seem to have an almost cult-like devotion to simplicity. They think adding any facility for abstraction makes a language into a complicated mess like C++, and any type system feature that didn’t exist in C makes a language into an ivory tower academic plaything like Haskell. The way the author talks about spending all day writing a perfectly beautiful, inscrutable piece of Rust code is an example of that. Yes, there are a few things in rust that are a bit harder to understand, but not to such an exaggerated extent, and that strawman is really not the typical experience when writing Rust. It’s very unusual for an experienced user of any mainstream language (except C++) to have any real difficulty understanding what a given piece of code does.

This horse has been long flogged to death.

My list: Mostly fits in my head, gc, not horribly slow, boring concurrency, low effort cross-compilation, good distribution story.

It's contentious but I like the "low abstraction ceiling". Go punishes people who want to turn everything into a framework or abstraction and rewards people who just knuckle down and write the code that solves the actual problem instance.

Is it the "best" programming language on any single axis? Absolutely not. Are the ergonomics right for getting stuff done? Yep, at least for this commenter.

The author here, thanks for posting this. I can see a lot of people not agreeing with Go, that’s fine, I still love writing it everyday. Taking choices away from you in terms of language features enables you to focus on the problem you’re solving. That makes it a great choice to me.

The parts of Go that make the most sense to me are the default static linking and the easy cross-compilation. rust does part of this, but C-dependent crates are easy to introduce (e.g. openssl-sys) and directly cause cross-compilation to be a disaster.

go has excessive verbosity, poor error handling, rough edges for package/dependency management, and forces you to use interface for too many things.

it’s not a bad language, but i would not choose it for a new project or base my company around it

i'm at my point in my career (20 years xp) where i think every project should be built around pure functions and structs, sorted in modules. And only once you're sure there absolutely no other choices, add a bit of interfaces, class and inheritance. Which, imho should happen extremely rarely.

I've come to realize that the amount of useless abstractions we add just because the language lets us, instead of thinking more deeply about what exactly is the problem we're facing, is just insane.

Starting a new side gig with Go next month and I’m pretty excited. It’ll be my first big Go project. I’ll be using htmx to handle FE stuff and I’m still discussing with the UX designer (they use Webflow) if we can somehow take htmx into account at design time. MySQL as db (customer’s choice), so let’s see how that stacks up.

It highly depends on the nature of the project. I like Go, but after prototyping my side project in a bunch of lang. ended up using Python (FastAPI, SQLModel) because it was literally order of magnitude less code than say doing same thing in Go.

What do people use for authentication in Go web applications? To me that’s the big missing piece. Just about everything else is in the standard library.

"Go is ripe for Web Development" - not really. See youtube videos by Web Dev Cody or Ben Davis who tried Golang in this context and went back to Ts.

I would say the major strength of Golang is practical community which tends to avoid elegant complexity. The downside is pointers and the lack of null-safety.

They really committed an original sin by omitting generics in early versions of Go, it was added in more recent versions, but too late IMO.

All of these points apply to modern dotnet as well

What exactly does Go have over C# other than being “sexy” and an emphasis on minimalism?

I’ve watched from the sidelines over the years. I hear more people talk about it than use it.

Because it is Java 2.0

"because you want to work for Google" /s