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Why people in Google hate Go?

28 pointsby altunover 1 year ago
When you search &quot;golang&quot; on google for a long time, the question &quot;Why people hate Go?&quot; comes up at the top.<p>Now the blog post &quot;A new way to bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly&quot; written by the team of V8 (JavaScript and WebAssembly engine) on the official website of Google has appeared.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v8.dev&#x2F;blog&#x2F;wasm-gc-porting<p>When I saw in the first paragraph of the blog that &quot;we will get into the technical details of how GC languages such as Java, Kotlin, Dart, Python, and C# can be ported to Wasm&quot; the question &quot;Why people in Google hate Go?&quot; arose

22 comments

boxmeinover 1 year ago
Go is an extremely productive language in our experience (large majority of the back-end is in Go).<p>Go excels in tooling and code sharing, and onboarding developers with Go is efficient.<p>It also has an extremely small runtime footprint, reducing ecological footprint and server costs :) An average JVM needs 500+ MB of RAM, whereas our average Go microservice hovers around 25 MB.<p>Last but not least, it is not tied to the existing C ecosystem, which is a HUGE value add in containerized environments where in the majority case you can make a Docker image that is based on `scratch`.<p>Of course there are some quirks (lack of try syntax for example), but Go programs are also simpler to comprehend due to intentional exclusion of AOP, try-catch, etc.<p>Lastly, the interface system is probably the most straight forward and simple for general programming :)
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nappy-dooover 1 year ago
I worked on Go at Google for a couple of years.<p>First of all, I can&#x27;t really parse your question, but I&#x27;ll try to answer what I think you&#x27;re asking.<p>Go isn&#x27;t hated at Google – there&#x27;s just a lot of other code in other languages. C++ and Java are the two most popular, with Python probably rounding out the top three. Go would probably be number 4 (discounting Javascript, because I&#x27;m really focused on backend or infra tech).<p>Go&#x27;s performance is not as good as LLVM derivatives, but that&#x27;s not what it tries to be. It&#x27;s a simple language, that tries to be as helpful as possible to the programmer. I describe it as a big-boy python, but think of it as &quot;the C I always wanted.&quot;<p>Generally, I don&#x27;t need the performance of C++. I think lots of people that think they do are probably wrong, but I try to not argue on the internet. If I need to get something done, and get on to the next thing, I use Go. Do I leave cycles on the floor and have (very small) GC pauses – yes, but I get my stuff done, and IMO it&#x27;s a small price to pay.<p>Use whatever language helps you get your stuff done. Stop arguing over languages.<p>--<p>Having said that, if the question is, &quot;why aren&#x27;t the WebAssembly people mentioning Go?&quot; I don&#x27;t know. Go&#x27;s supported WASM for a long-time, and the people inside Google who care about WASM care about Go. There is new stuff in WASM not really taken advantage of in Go, but Go is also a strange animal with a strange stack model, and it takes time. I would think, as with all things Go, it&#x27;ll be there, but it will take a little time, be thorough, complete, well thought out, and maintained roughly forever.
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jjgreenover 1 year ago
Go puzzles me. It&#x27;s slower than C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;Rust and GCed, so not really suited for performance critical stuff. No OO so not really suited for larger complex applications. So for smaller not-performance-critical programs, why not Python, Typescript etc? It seems that its popularity exceeds its scope, or am I missing something?
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fifiluraover 1 year ago
I am not a functional programming fanatic, but I do appreciate all the functional constructs making their way into less esoteric languages. Such as map&#x2F;reduce and in general working with immutables.<p>Golang does not have this and it makes me feel like programming with only one hand. In particular when working with data and aggregations.<p>I am prepared to be corrected, I have only looked briefly at golang, so I am happy to give golang proponents a chance to shine!
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Someoneover 1 year ago
They don’t mention go in that list of languages that <i>now</i> can be compiled for the browser because go already has a wasm backend (GOARCH=wasm)
thihtover 1 year ago
There are the languages people shit on, and the languages nobody use.<p>Go is far from perfect, but I’m productive with it, it’s expressive enough that it’s both easy to write AND read, it’s performant enough, easy to build and deploy, and most importantly, it gets shit done. I don’t need more, but the Go team still delivers great updates every 6 months or so.
usrbinbashover 1 year ago
&gt; When you search &quot;golang&quot; on google for a long time, the question &quot;Why people hate Go?&quot; comes up at the top.<p>I just did. Here are my top10 results:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;go.dev&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Go_(programming_language)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Go_(programming_language)</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang&#x2F;go</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Go_(Programmiersprache)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Go_(Programmiersprache)</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gobyexample.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gobyexample.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;golang" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;golang</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;golang</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeksforgeeks.org&#x2F;go-programming-language-introduction&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeksforgeeks.org&#x2F;go-programming-language-introd...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeksforgeeks.org&#x2F;go-programming-language-introduction&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geeksforgeeks.org&#x2F;go-programming-language-introd...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freecodecamp.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;what-is-go-programming-language&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freecodecamp.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;what-is-go-programming-lan...</a><p>This continues down for dozens of results. Articles, Frameworks, Tutorials, Projects.
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Luker88over 1 year ago
IMHO the hate comes from golang looking more like a better python than a better C.<p>Onboarding of new people is extremely fast, but lack of features will result in seniors hitting a wall on what they can do and guarantee with the language.<p>While go tooling great, you still have to test for most of the edge cases that C and python have: nullpointers, lack of proper enums&#x2F;typesafety. This is commonly reflected in the tests that have to check for lots of trivial things.<p>Rust is much more difficult to learn, but the amount of things you need to test is drastically reduced, and seniors appreciate that.<p>What we see in our company is that juniors will find go wonderful, seniors dream of switching to Rust.<p>The hate probably comes from high expectations (especially coming from python&#x2F;C), followed by hitting a feature wall due to how opinionated (and slow to adopt new features) golang is.
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favadiover 1 year ago
&gt; When you search &quot;golang&quot; on google for a long time, the question &quot;Why people hate Go?&quot; comes up at the top.<p>I don&#x27;t see this article in the first page when searching for golang. Maybe the results is personalized based on your search history?<p>&gt; Why people in Google hate Go?<p>I really doubt that. Most developers I know, that worked with Go for a while, love it for its simplicity and tooling.
gnivover 1 year ago
&gt; When you search &quot;golang&quot; on google for a long time, the question &quot;Why people hate Go?&quot; comes up at the top.<p>What does this mean? Where do you see this? Also, I don&#x27;t believe that question comes up verbatim, since it&#x27;s not grammatically correct.
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edimoldovanover 1 year ago
It has a richest std lib with quite good performance which makes it suitable for a lot of use cases where one wants to reduce dependency. I also find it quite easy to learn. Personally use for all web products I build as I have gotten the hang of it and have a small sort of framework to build products quickly with. And I get to ship a single binary to production.
altunover 1 year ago
Related: The State of WebAssembly 2023<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.scottlogic.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-state-of-webassembly-2023.html#:~:text=WebAssembly%20is%20still%20most%20often,people%20are%20most%20interested%20in" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.scottlogic.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;18&#x2F;the-state-of-webassem...</a>.
ksecover 1 year ago
I dont think people in Google hate Go. But I have heard multiple times people in Google hate Ruby.
sebastianconcptover 1 year ago
Well, putting aside arguments based purely on money, what&#x27;s the fundamental &quot;edge&quot; that Go gives you as an engineer betting you career long term on it that isn&#x27;t better used in some alternative?
pushingiceover 1 year ago
When I was there the only complaint I heard was the golang exceptions to the style guide. In no other language would you be allowed to name a variable a single letter like &quot;r&quot; for example.
izacusover 1 year ago
&quot;Hate&quot;? What do you mean by &quot;hate&quot;?
actionfromafarover 1 year ago
Why people outside Google hate Go?
belterover 1 year ago
&quot;Why people hate Go?&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;golang&#x2F;comments&#x2F;mjhf5h&#x2F;why_people_hate_go&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;golang&#x2F;comments&#x2F;mjhf5h&#x2F;why_people_h...</a>
andrewstuartover 1 year ago
There’s still no ideal language.<p>Closest seems something like Zig but it doesn’t seem to be getting much velocity.<p>I really wish TypeScript had an official native code compiler. It did have one but only for microcontrollers and I’m not sure even that still exists.
ChrisArchitectover 1 year ago
Ask HN:
destevilover 1 year ago
Go isn&#x27;t a serious language for large systems. The language allows writing shitty code and the community has largely adopted that. Go fanatics will hate this, but you simply can&#x27;t compare it with the ability to write and maintain in languages like Java.
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Saphyelover 1 year ago
Go was created for an internal promotion of a guy in Google, he already got the promotion I believe, so there&#x27;s no real use case to keep using it.
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