Go is amazing, period.

http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2012/03/experiences-in-go-ing.html

by dhaivatpandya • 14 years ago

271 231 14 years ago

poincare101.blogspot.com

firefoxman12• 14 years ago

Is there currently a good web framework for Go?

Edit: web.go looks pretty sweet: http://www.getwebgo.com/

Edit2: As does app.go: https://github.com/georgenava/appgo

...There's a large list of Go projects here: http://godashboard.appspot.com/project

zemo2• 14 years ago

unlike other languages, a framework isn't as much of a requirement in Go since the Go standard library includes an http server, json serialization/deserialization, html templating, email, logging, basically everything you need in a web app. The url routing is pretty crappy, but that's my only real gripe. ngmoco's Falcore is worth looking at: https://github.com/ngmoco/falcore

drivebyacct29• 14 years ago

Gorilla's mux adds much more capable and advanced routing. It's really nice to use it with subroutes, etc. Again, dead simple partly because it's designed well and partly because Go makes it easy to build.

http://gorilla-web.appspot.com/pkg/gorilla/mux/

If you want something more lightweight (Gorilla's not "heavy" by any means) there is pat (formerly pat.go)

https://github.com/bmizerany/pat

enneff16• 14 years ago

> Is there currently a good web framework for Go?

The standard library gives you almost everything you need.

The http package provides a web server and client: http://weekly.golang.org/net/http/

The template package provides text templates: http://weekly.golang.org/text/template/ and automatically-escaped HTML templates: http://weekly.golang.org/html/template/

For other bits and pieces, see the rest of the standard library: http://weekly.golang.org/

I also recommend the Gorilla Web Toolkit for some other useful web-app functionality: http://gorilla-web.appspot.com/

4ad4• 14 years ago

Yup, the standard library was all I ever needed. People from other languages are familiar with frameworks and seek them in Go, but I'd say they are seldom required. The rich standard library and the language makes everything easy.

dhaivatpandya5• 14 years ago

I've used web.go successfully before; its quite nice.

firefoxman12• 14 years ago

What's it like to use a compiled language for a web server?

jbarham6• 14 years ago

Note that there is experimental support for Go on App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/overview.html) and the beta versions are tracking the Go 1 changes pretty closely.

jff3• 14 years ago

A simple server for static files and blog posts: https://bitbucket.org/floren/goblog

It uses only the packages which ship with Go, with the exception of a Markdown parser. Unfortunately, it's written for an ~6 month old release of Go on Plan 9, but you can get the general idea of building Go web stuff. The code's a bit ugly too, but it does work.

Radzell2• 14 years ago

I like go. As a guy who really doesn't like javascript I like the structure of GO. I like really structured languages. For anyone who like the mobile/desktop type of programming this seems like a refreshing change.

ootachi19• 14 years ago

Er, JavaScript is a structured language (meaning it doesn't mandate labels and goto for control flow).

brnstz2• 14 years ago

Many programmers educated in the OOP days don't know the term "structured programming". I once interviewed someone who called a Pascal-like language "functional". We hired him anyway.

enneff16• 14 years ago

I think what your parent is referring to is that, compared to JavaScript, Go provides a fairly rigid structure in which to write programs. You write packages that consist of type, function, and variable declarations, and link them together with import statements. Its rich standard library supports a range of useful, omnipresent interfaces, which make it easy to do things in an obviously correct, interoperable way.

By comparison, JavaScript lets you structure your code in however you like, and there is a very tiny standard library and no real uniformity across implementations, frameworks, and so on. This can be a strength, but I think on balance it is a real weakness in JS. node.js has done a lot to improve this, though the language itself still lets you define anything, anywhere, at any time, and change that state from anywhere else.

juliennakache• 14 years ago

Wow. This dude is 14 year old.

oomkiller• 14 years ago

Yep, and he just released his bayesian alg he talks about here: https://github.com/Poincare/Bayesian.go

braco_alva• 14 years ago

Yeah, very impressive for someone of his age, I wish there were more kids like him.

bane• 14 years ago

reminds me a bit of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Silverman

halayli• 14 years ago

The OP easily dismissed numpy in Python and coroutines (e.g gevent)

zemo2• 14 years ago

to be honest, I've used both gevent and Go and concurrency is far more natural in Go. Sure, you can do most of what you want with gevent, and if you're using stackless or pypy you can even have channels, but implementing concurrency at the library level is a mistake. It feels bolted on. It's like how some programming languages weren't object oriented from the start, but then they bolted an object system on top of it in a later release; it feels kludgy and you notice that it's bolted on. Concurrency in Python reminds me of that. Yes, it works, but it's awkward and feels like a second-class citizen.

jbarham6• 14 years ago

I've done concurrent programming in both Python and Go, and to be fair to Python, its standard library queue class (http://docs.python.org/library/queue.html) is very close to Go's channels so it does CSP style concurrency quite nicely.

However, Go's goroutines are IMHO superior to Python threads since they're much more lightweight and can run in parallel on multi-core CPUs and you can have a lot more of them.

Go gets it right by putting goroutines and channels into the core language to encourage CSP style concurrency, but putting other more traditional, but harder-to-use, concurrency primitives like mutexes into the standard library.

swah2• 14 years ago

I'd love to have Python library availability in a staticly typed language.

ootachi19• 14 years ago

Many statically typed languages have excellent library support. At this point Java, for example, has all of the libraries that Python has, and more.

simplyinfinity• 14 years ago

there are also a lot of libraries for the .net platform outside the framework itself , too

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

Not only excellent library support, but also a large array of productivity tools ranging from superb IDE, static code analysis, build+dependency tools, great Continuous Integration, etc.

dhaivatpandya5• 14 years ago

Haskell also has (pretty) good library support (talking about "batteries included")

swah2• 14 years ago

It's mainly a bad impression then, that w/ Python every document is to the point and with Java an outsider can't do anything?

I'll try to build my next project on top of github.com/codahale/dropwizard

drivebyacct29• 14 years ago

Not to push the issue, but Go's standard libraries are fairly decent for being minimal and are dead simple to use. The docs have a good mix of examples and quickly parseable information.

reddit_clone• 14 years ago

How about IDE's? Does Go have good Emacs/Eclipse support yet?

olefoo• 14 years ago

You should look at the work on pypy; specifically the RPython subset of python. It uses type hinting for static type analysis for the JIT compiler. It's not as hardcore as a fully statically typed language like ML or C but it will catch mistakes in mixing types.

See http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/rtyper.html

j452• 14 years ago

A lot of great and capable languages are overlooked.

The question is how do they overcome the opinion, hearsay and preferences that are louder than the truth?

Too few devs:

- truly give something 5 minutes before jumping to their foregone conclusion.

- admit that most languages with a decent capable and decent programmer are all, pretty equally equipped.

- every language + framework has it's pros and cons.

dhaivatpandya5• 14 years ago

I didn't give Lisp 5 minutes; something I still regret (could have learned it so much earlier!)

brnstz2• 14 years ago

Go has the advantage of being developed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. It also potentially has the marketing muscle of Google behind it, although the most I've seen so far is free stuffed Gophers at OSCON.

Type safety, easy concurrency, static checking, C-like syntax, fast compilation time, concise syntax, etc. Java is ripe for replacing as the default language for (new) large systems. The replacement could be another language on the JVM, but I think Go has a good shot.

ootachi19• 14 years ago

Depends what you mean by type safety. If by type safety you mean free from segfaults, Go is very much type-unsafe (send a map over a channel, access it concurrently, and it will segfault).

sausagefeet5• 14 years ago

Unfortunately Go still lacks generics, something that will hinder it from being widely accepted from the Java/C# crowd, for good reason. There are some good arguments to be made for why Go's error handling is subpar as well that I think could disqualify it for a lot of people.

lusr5• 14 years ago

5 minutes isn't fair. I took a look at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al... first. OK so Go is about on par with Mono's C# performance and uses up to a 1/3 of the memory with code that is more concise. That's cool because it means I'm not sacrificing anything over the platform I specialize in (C#; although the last time I looked at the Alioth C# code I thought I saw some obvious improvements). I see there is a Go STOMP client for Apache Apollo, which means I can supplement the existing code in my current project without having to rewrite everything.

So next I looked at:

* http://golang.org/doc/go_tutorial.html

* http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html

Way more than 5 minutes. Where are generics or do I have to learn some new construct? Wait a minute, is this thing object oriented or what? If not, why not? Do I have to learn some new philosophy? Already feeling a sense of dread having been through this game 10s of times before with other languages.

I decided to research a bit to see if anybody else with a C# background had looked into Go. I found this, which confirmed my feelings that Go is for people who probably haven't given C# or Java a fair chance: http://www.jondavis.net/techblog/?tag=/c%23+vs+go . That's when I also discovered searching for 'Go' on Google is impossible because of the poor choice of name and decided I wasn't going to spend any more time on it, already being aware that aside from what looks like a total philosophy change (without it being clear whether it'll be worth it), I'm going to lose out on my awesome set of development tools (Visual Studio), years of C# experience and the HUGE .NET ecosystem, in exchange for what? Relatively unimportant performance advantages?

At the end of the day, if performance/memory are issues I can just add more EC2 nodes to my architecture. At some point I'll hopefully make enough money to pay other people to worry about the technology. That being said I realize that as a developer who wants to be a manager/owner I'm probably in the minority of readers here.

adgar5• 14 years ago

It seems you deleted your comment asking why you were downvoted. Here's why you were downvoted:

> Way more than 5 minutes. Where are generics or do I have to learn some new construct? Wait a minute, is this thing object oriented or what? If not, why not? Do I have to learn some new philosophy? Already feeling a sense of dread having been through this game 10s of times before with other languages.

If you didn't get past the fact that Go isn't object oriented, then you clearly didn't get very far into the language. And your resistance to "some new philosophy" shows you aren't interested in a new language with real ideas, but at most a different way to express what you already know and do while programming.

j452• 14 years ago

Hi, the idea with "5 minutes" is to find the first thing that wasn't as you might have thought it was. Then, you keep finding more, and more.

Ultimately we will find things we like, or are willing to suffer and cover up (true in every community).

It's just how open minded we really are.

drivebyacct29• 14 years ago

>Already feeling a sense of dread having been through this game 10s of times before with other languages.

What? I'm a student still learning new languages and it took me no time to look up and quickly grok duck typing. If that prevents you from learning a language...

Seriously... it's an hour to skim and read through. Hour or two to put together a decent non-trivial server demonstrating channels. I really don't know what your big long rant is about. It's not hard to find reasons Go was designed the way it was, find what it's goal is and read enough intro docs to get up and coding with it easily.

ketralnis• 14 years ago

Your points #2 and #3 are in conflict. Not all languages are equally equipped for the same tasks, which is what really matters. I wouldn't write a web application in bash any more than I'd write a batch file renamer in assembly and pretending that the programmer not being "decent" enough to make those things true is disingenuous

tpsreport4• 14 years ago

Here's a summary of the article:

* author cannot write portable C sockets code

* author cannot handle C/C++

* author believes his app would be too slow in Python, later abandons App, but retains his bias against Python

* Go has no parens for if/for

* Go has unicode support

* Go has closures "like salt shakers"

* Go is cohesively designed

* Go has nice libraries

Go may or may not be a good language, but this kind of argument is not going to win me over.

noveltyaccount• 14 years ago

* Author is 14 years old

dhaivatpandya5• 14 years ago

Even if I was 59, I still think that the comment above is quite misinformed.

dhaivatpandya5• 14 years ago

I usually wouldn't respond to mean comments, but, this one really throws me off (I'm the OP).

There is a very strong difference between "cannot write" and the need for something to be simple.

I can definitely handle C/C++, and I don't think writing something in a higher-level language changes that.

If something is doing processing with 4000 threads with around 10 years worth of by-the-minute data, it sure as hell will run too slow in Python.

And, the arguments stated after are not crucial to "making you switch to Go", which was not the point of the article anyway.

EDIT: Also, I did not abandon the app, and in fact open sourced the Bayesian filter stuff I wrote right here: https://github.com/Poincare/Bayesian.go

rocha2• 14 years ago

Are you processing data using 4000 threads? Do you have access to a cluster? Otherwise it seems counter-productive. BTW, Python has great facilities (IPython.parallel) for doing parallel and distributed computing. It is also pretty good at number crunching using Numpy.

tpsreport4• 14 years ago

I simply summarized your article. There is nothing wrong with not being up to handling C++'s error messages. I don't feel up to that task myself most of the time.

But your arguments for Go rang hollow. I'd urge you to go through the "pro-Go" arguments point by point and describe why, say, they apply to Go but not to Python 3.0. And I'm not a Python zealot by any means; I mention it as a comparison point mostly because it's very commonly used.

There are undoubtedly lots of great reasons to use Go, but your article did not enunciate them in a way that would win people over.

Peaker2• 14 years ago

Did you try Haskell?

Knowing Haskell makes reading about Go a very underwhelming experience.

Maro• 14 years ago

A tip: if you have say 4 cores, then using 4000 threads will most likely be slow due to lots of context switches. I say most likely because it depends on the details, but it's a safe guess.

drivebyacct29• 14 years ago

So, a developer likes that list of things and it fits their project. Your comment offers nothing as a counter to choosing Go in such a situation. Your comment literally brings nothing to the discussion except a tl;dr for anyone who chose to not read it (if you didn't, go read it)

I mean, if I want to write a cross platform websocket server signaling server for PeerConnection, what would you recommend that will let me write a statically typed server in 80 lines of code that's all standard libraries? (edit: Websockets was moved to a `go install`able package recently)

gukjoon• 14 years ago

Wow. 1. Have you written or debugged C sockets code? Because if you have, I doubt you would be dinging him on not wanting to do that. 2. He doesn't want to handle C/C++. I would say that most people who write application code are with him. 3. Yeah... I'm pretty sure Python, an interpreted language, is slower than Go, a compiled language. Even with the progress PyPy is making, I doubt it's going to beat Go.

The author needs no age defense. He makes a ton of valid points for why you should try out Go.

ootachi19• 14 years ago

PyPy is an optimizing JIT compiler; 6g/8g is not an optimizing compiler. I'm pretty sure one could construct examples in which PyPy beats Go for this reason (try something that relies on loop-invariant code motion, for example).

Additionally, PyPy has many garbage collection algorithms, while Go has a stop-the-world mark-and-sweep collector.

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

Not to mention that his remark regarding Unicode support in Go reveals a total lack of knowledge in programming languages.

stiff• 14 years ago

It's hard to expect a really detailed analysis from someone still in high school. On the other hand, it is good to see how the various languages look like from a fresh perspective of someone with relatively little preconceptions from years of using C/C++/Python/whatever. After all, if he has lots of problems with writing something in C++, but much less when writing it in Go, it probably means lots of us had at some point to internalize lots of knowledge that's not directly relevant to the problem being solved, but to the intricacies of C++ or whatever. If the next generation of programmers can avoid this, that's a huge step ahead in what problems we will be able to solve.

lclarkmichalek• 14 years ago

Please, ignore people's age, it makes people in high school much happier. From someone in highschool (or the UK equivalent), the age anonymity of the internet is one of it's greatest strengths.

I think he'll still have to learn a fair few tricks to get around some features of Go. Things like type assertions, float32 vs float64, get ready for it lack of generics, and no distinction between stack and heap aren't common in other similar languages, and just getting to know the standard library is a huge part of being productive in a language. C could be seen as better in that respect; the core language is _very_ simple, which can't really be said for Go, though the advantages of Go probably out weigh the advantages of C for many people.

rian3• 14 years ago

i truly believe go contributes negative work to society. it's basically C/C++/Java/C# with syntactic sugar except it's different enough to get bored programmers to waste their precious time reporting all their code.

if you want to learn a new language, actually learn a new language. learn a language that's actually breaking the mold in terms of how we communicate with computers. think at a higher abstraction level than dynamic dispatch and composable objects and subroutines, that stuff is already more than 40 years old.

http://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_l...

drivebyacct29• 14 years ago

So because it's not revolutionary, it is actually harmful? Sorry, I don't follow at all. Even if it's "better" than C/C++/Java/C# [1], then it's a positive contribution.

[1] I think it's silly to imply that languages are "better" than one another. Some are more apt for certain projects and some have different feature sets that appeal to certain people. Certainly it seems unrealistic to absolutely call a language useless, especially given the points in this articl.

jshen2• 14 years ago

I completely disagree. My goal is to build better systems, and if an evolutionary change helps this, then that's where I'm going.

You seem to value "breaking the mold" for the sake of "breaking the mold" Or, you didn't give a good reason to value it.

"that stuff is already more than 40 years old.". Is this the fashion industry? Or do you believe that quality is a function of age?

njharman• 14 years ago

I agree with your goal. But the parent is correct in that learning a really different language will help you become a better developer and thus build better systems.

rian3• 14 years ago

people who program actually have a lot to learn from the fashion industry. trends are fine as long as trends are iterated on quickly. in comparison, it's taken programmers 15 years to make the half-assed-jump from java to go. and even then, the conceptual differences between java and go are minimal, superficial at best.

the fact is that go touts itself as a C++/java alternative but i see no significant/non-superficial reason to actually change languages. thinking in go is 99% the same thing as thinking in C++. consequently, 99% of the time doing stuff in go takes me roughly the same amount of time as doing the same thing in C++. programmers remain stunted.

we all know how efficient we can be writing code like in the von neumann style (not to mention 90% of programmers haven't yet even mastered that). to advance what people can do with computers it's time to start thinking beyond sequences of instructions and memory accesses, we need a language that encourages higher-order thinking. otherwise it's like building the empire state building with legos.

jaimzob• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've looked at Go quite a bit and I can't figure out what new problems it solves, or how it solves existing problems better than previous procedural/OOP languages. How is better than 'D' for example. How is it better than Java?

If you want a fresh look at systems programming then leaning Ocaml or Haskell would be a much better option because you will learn to solve problems in a new way, not just with slightly different syntax.

Also, someone on this thread doesn't understand how downvoting works. If you disagree with something then make a response, save downvotes for deliberately trollish or off-topic comments.

jkn5• 14 years ago

How is better than 'D' for example.

One thing I really like in Go is how small the language is.

srean• 14 years ago

I have'nt managed enough time yet to familiarize myself with Go, but the little that I have glanced at, it seems a nice enough language for scientific computation. The syntax and semantics of arrays are nice and binding to C is purportedly simple. Ease of binding with Fortran would have been nice too. So I find it a bit strange that I never hear of Go in the context of array based computation, that is the stuff people use Numpy, MATLAB, J, K for.

Is there any particular reason for that or is it just that not many have got around to doing it.

A type-inferred language with first class functions, with strong support for parallelism, and good support for arrays and slicing seems a really sweet deal. Throw in SIMD and it is already very compelling. Is anything wrong with the picture that I am missing. Performance issues ?

georgemcbay4• 14 years ago

Thus far you barely hear of anyone using Go in any context, though that is changing.

I think the primary reason for the lack of users has been language stability. The Go team are currently working on the first actual "release" of the language ("Go 1") to address this. But prior to the move towards Go 1, the language was very much in flux, more so than you'd want for a language (that you'll actively be maintaining code in) to be. (And gofix, while nice, isn't really a substitute for language and standard library stability).

krasin• 14 years ago

According to the recent weekly release, they are 1-2 weeks before Go 1 release: http://weekly.golang.org/doc/devel/weekly.html#2012-03-13

eternalban• 14 years ago

> And gofix, while nice, isn't really a substitute for language and standard library stability

I agree with you in principle but practically, gofix (+ gofmt) it is pretty darn close. I revisited a Go project that I wrote back when it first came out (in other words, an ancient one :). Biggest pita was dealing with the 'error' changes that gofix couldn't fix (and some minor pain due to time and Duration), but everything else was taken care of by the tool.

In any event, my understanding is that the Go authors will strategically depend on gofix to deal with language evolution (beyond "Go 1").

I've been coding since '82 and have had my share of PLs. Go is a serious contender and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a "modern" C.

ootachi19• 14 years ago

The concurrent stop-the-world garbage collector is a performance issue. Additionally, the Plan 9-based compiler is not an optimizing compiler.

dsymonds2• 14 years ago

Have you found the GC to be an actual problem? Or are you assuming it is? It's a very different situation to other GC-based languages.

enneff16• 14 years ago

"...not an optimizing compiler." ?

The gc compiler does perform some optimizations, including inlining across package boundaries. There is also the gccgo compiler which takes full advantage of gcc's many optimizations. Both compilers will be equally supported in Go 1.

canop_fr4• 14 years ago

I concur about arrays. Each time I make computations in java and I have to either pass offsets and lengths or make arraycopy I regret not to code in Go.

georgemcbay4• 14 years ago

As someone who is 38, and has programmed in everything from 6510/68k/MIPS/ARM assembler to C/C++ to ActionScript/haxe/JavaScript to D to Python, et al, I also think Go is pretty great.

In addition to the cool things in the language, I really love what they are doing with the build system. The Go programming I've been doing has been on Windows but targeting an ARM CPU (the PXA168 in the Chumby 8 device) and cross-compiling Go code requires simply setting a couple of environmental variables. Sooo much nicer than having to set up a full-on GNU-style cross-compiling setup and using different toolchains for all your different targets.

eg:

set GOOS=windows

set GOARCH=386

go build

Just built my project for Windows x86.

---

set GOOS=windows

set GOARCH=amd64

go build

Just built my project for Windows x64

---

set GOOS=linux

set GOARCH=ARM

set GOARM=5

go build

Just built my project for the Chumby device.

---

I highly recommend checking Go out and looking past any of the superficial allergies you have to it (I'm historically a braces-on-their-own-line guy, so getting used to the strict enforcement of the other style was a pain for me) and giving it at least a few weeks to sink in. If it still isn't your cup of tea after that, then that's fine, but it is well worth a look, IMO.

tedunangst2• 14 years ago

Windows port details? I start at golang.org, link to http://golang.org/doc/install.html. Says "A port to Microsoft Windows is in progress but incomplete." That in turn links to the world's least helpful wiki page: Page "WindowsPort" Not Found.

Where do I find out more about the Windows port?

enneff16• 14 years ago

Go 1 is about to be released. See the install docs for Go 1 at http://weekly.golang.org/doc/install - these include windows instructions.

drivebyacct29• 14 years ago

You have to build the standard libraries and cross compilers first. I've seen this pair of zsh functions around. It will build the necessary bits and will also build for win/mac/linux/freebsd in simple projects and zip up the results for distribution (You can link to the raw zips then on github). For others looking to do this with go: https://github.com/colemickens/scripts/blob/master/dotfiles/... (Minor editting is needed due to some assumed values $ARCH, $OS, etc)

CamperBob5• 14 years ago

I'm historically a braces-on-their-own-line guy, so getting used to the strict enforcement of the other style was a pain for me

Wait, what?

FreakLegion3• 14 years ago

    void func()
    {
    }

vs.

    void func() {
    }

Does Go really enforce the latter? That would be incredibly silly.

kaib• 14 years ago

Nice. How is the arm compiler holding up? I wrote the original 5g and ken did a large bug fix and optimizer sweep at some point so I'm interested in hearing how it has been going?

georgemcbay4• 14 years ago

I haven't been inspecting the code of the arm compiler itself, but it has yet to fail me on my project, so kudos for the original implementation.

Having previously worked for chumby industries (makers of those bean bag alarm clock internet device thigies) I've got a nice collection of ARMv5 class devices laying around waiting to become useful and it is nice to have a modern language that is relatively low level support development on them. Quite a few other projects out there with arm support only care about v7+.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Hmm,

The complaint I see here seem to be about c/c++ libraries. TL;DR; c is too level and boost sucks (ie, is too complexified).

Go sounds like one fine answer to this. I would claim that c++ with QT is another answer to this. Write parsers for DSLs quickly and easily with QT - its container classes work without nightmarish overtemplating, its string class is like an ordinary class, etc.

nakkiel3• 14 years ago

That's funny. On my resumé, I always word it as "C++/Qt" because C++ with Qt is no more complicated than Python for most things (well at least it was so a couple of years ago).

rplnt• 14 years ago

I've used glib for some "string and network stuff" with C and was quite happy.

http://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.30/

briancurtin2• 14 years ago

> The first thing I immediately noticed is that they got rid of the parentheses in "if" and "for" statements. Coming from Python, I really like this.

Python doesn't enforce any parenthesis in those statements, so how were you using them in Python that changes how you'd do the same thing in Go?

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

I assume he likes it because it doesn't change anything. He's used to the Python way.

briancurtin2• 14 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but "they got rid of the parentheses" sounds like either Go used to require parentheses for this or he thought Python did. If it was the former, then I misread (I don't know very much about Go).

ek• 14 years ago

I really like most things about Go, and was even going to use it for a bytecode interpreter project I was working on. A problem that I ran into, however, was that in interpreting a dynamic language with a stack machine, we needed a way to be able to store arbitrary data in stack values, which in C/C++ would be done using a struct with a type flag and then a union of various types.

Go doesn't have unions, though, and so this means that we would have ended up using a struct and using about 3x the memory on average, per stack value. You can see this limitation exposed as well in goyacc, the port of Yacc to Go (as the name suggests). Where Bison uses a union for yylval, Go is forced to use a struct.

I think this has been discussed on the golang-nuts mailing list a couple times and dismissed, for reasons of which I'm not fully aware.

chmike2• 14 years ago

Unions is a problem for garbage collectors. It is difficult to know if it contains a reference or a value. Though Go should have a solution for your use case. The only one I see is polymorphism. Thus a stack of references to different instances of the same class.

ootachi19• 14 years ago

Discriminated (type-safe) unions like ML and Haskell have are no problem for garbage collectors: you simply assign one ID to each variant of the union, and prefix the data with the ID corresponding to the variant in use.

You can simulate ML-style unions in Go with interfaces and downcasts, or the reflect package (basically like case classes in Scala, but without the exhaustiveness checking). Unfortunately, downcasts in Go (and interfaces generally) are slow.

jkn5• 14 years ago

Couldn't you use an empty interface to store arbitrary values?

From the tutorial: Every type implements the empty interface, which makes it useful for things like containers.

Unions are on the roadmap: http://golang.org/doc/devel/roadmap.html but it's a list of ideas rather than features promised.

JulianMorrison3• 14 years ago

C people: think of interface {} as roughly the same as void*, except that values pointed to preserve information about their type which can be extracted and used later.

chmike2• 14 years ago

I looked at its serializing documentation and I was surprized to see that every floating point value is serialized to a double precision value. There are now four types of foating point values and this simplification is downgrading the capabilities of data tranfer. Extended is needed in some scientific computations. Appart from this, the base type encoding is great. The other weird choice is the structure encoding with field numbers and omitting null value fields. My impression is that this is less efficient than coding the null fields. Is this choice based on measurements ?

fdb• 14 years ago

How would you call foreign functions in C or C++ from Go? Is there something like a foreign function interface?

justincormack• 14 years ago

Yes there is a C ffi. Not that well documented last time I looked, but you can look at the source of the standard libraries for examples.

jkn5• 14 years ago

From http://blog.golang.org/2011/03/c-go-cgo.html :

  package rand
  
  /*
  #include <stdlib.h>
  */
  import "C"
  
  func Random() int {
     return int(C.random())
  }
  
  func Seed(i int) {
     C.srandom(C.uint(i))
  }

So calling C functions from Go is very easy. However the other way is not supported, AFAIK.

luriel2• 14 years ago

Calling Go from C is supported, but is not quite as straightforward. You can also use SWIG.

genbattle2• 14 years ago

Go has utility called CGo that allows you to create interfaces to C libraries in Go. I've heard you can use some magic to get Go to talk to C++ by exporting functions back to C somehow (disclaimer: I'm not a C/C++ person).

jstepien• 14 years ago

I couldn't sacrifice performance (lots of number crunching was involved with costs tight), so, I couldn't pick Python.

PyPy, Cython or Shed Skin might have been answers to those number crunching problems. I'd love to learn whether they would be sufficient for OP's performance requirements. Some benchmarks look promising, for instance this one published in late 2010: http://geetduggal.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/speed-up-your-pyt...

jwr2• 14 years ago

Support for Unicode as a groundbreaking language feature? Closures (and first-class functions) as a major achievement?

I don't want to sound smug, so I won't mention any languages I'm comparing to — but seriously, unless you've been living in Python-land, those things are nothing to write home about. I'm surprised this is getting so many upvotes.

If I were to praise Go, I would concentrate on something innovative — concurrency primitives are interesting, for instance. I would not consider them sufficient for all applications, but they are intriguing and worth discussing.

saulrh• 14 years ago

Closures and first-class functions aren't an achievement. Closures and first-class functions in a language low enough and fast enough level for systems programming? That's an achievement. Same for unicode. These aren't just features. These are features done fast.

unlogic3• 14 years ago

Lisp has been having all these for five decades now and those features are done fast. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

technomancy• 14 years ago

Yeah, my main complaint about Go is the way its adherents go on like its type inference is some incredible new invention. I guess in makes sense when you're selling it to Java people, but it rubs me the wrong way.

andrewnez• 14 years ago

Incidentally we're hosting a free "Evening with Go" tomorrow night in London: http://eveningwithgo.eventbrite.co.uk/

Aqueous• 14 years ago

"And, the worst problem I faced was of sockets. Non-blocking, multi-plexed and cross-platform socket support with C is basically non-existent (unless I wanted to use libev or libevent,"

What are you talking about? Most every single evented io library out there just boils down to a single system call in the underlying language - C: epoll(or select, poll, or kqueue) on socket/file descriptors. You do know that socket() returns a socket, which is actually just a file descriptor, right? You don't need libev and libevent because you can just write your own in two seconds with epoll! And if you're really attached to having the library handle the work for you you can always use one of the many cross-platform event libraries, like Glib which, last I checked, works on Win32, Mac, and Linux.

sigzero• 14 years ago

Inside a function, the := short assignment statement can be used in place of the short var declaration.

(Outside a function, every construct begins with a keyword and the := construct is not available.)

===

Why is that? I would find that frustrating and inconsistent.

prtamil3• 14 years ago

Is the Author is 13 years old. When did he really start programming.? just wondering After 16 years of programming experience still not able to decide which language is best. At last Settled for C and Common Lisp. But still have Doubts. As per Personal Experience Both Language is more than enough for me.

prtamil3• 14 years ago

ok guys,, Let me print my wisdom, "Its not the programming language its You,its always you"

observer1• 14 years ago

If you are going to create a headline that ends with ", period." the content of the article had better contain a cohesive and very strong argument that supports the emphasized statement. You could have easily posted - "Go is amazing." That is a statement of opinion -- which pretty well describes the article and the author's place as an expert. "Go is amazing, period." claims something much deeper, which the article completely fails to deliver.

namidark• 14 years ago

So he recommends Go but has never actually used it? The only reason he looked at it again was the potential to use it for a small project he never finished or did I miss something?

Osiris• 14 years ago

My background is in garbage-collected languages, including .NET and PHP. Because of my lack of background in manual memory management, I've always been nervous to try to learn C, even when it may be a better approach.

Go sounds like a great language for someone with my background to be able to work with a closer to the metal language but by handling some of the more difficult aspects of working with C like memory management and pointer arithmetic.

nsomething• 14 years ago

Go needs Allman style. It's unnatural to me otherwise

Go is amazing, period.

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