Go turns three

http://blog.golang.org/2012/11/go-turns-three.html

by enneff • 14 years ago

196 61 14 years ago

blog.golang.org

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

Congratulations to everyone involved with Go. I've been loving using it and it's nice to see CloudFlare mentioned in that post as we are using Go more and more for our production systems.

xorl• 14 years ago

Agreed, I've been having a lot of fun with the language and have been using it more and more on a daily basis.

lbarrow4• 14 years ago

We've been playing around with Go where I work. The concurrency model is great, and the type/object/interface approach is pretty flexible. The language designers also succeeded in eliminating many of the pain points they felt with C/C++/Java: dependency bloat and compilation speed. My workflow with Go has more in common with an interpreted language than anything else.

However, the lack of generics seems like a pretty bad oversight. It's annoying to rewrite common functional operations (e.g. map, reduce) over and over again with slightly different argument types (or sprinkling type casts all over your code).

objclxt2• 14 years ago

This is probably one of the most discussed things on the Go mailing list (golang-nuts, if anyone is interested). Unlike some other features (like exceptions, again something oft discussed) there seems to be some openness towards it, but also a desire to not introduce anything that would cause increased complexity without a similar or greater increase in value.

lbarrow4• 14 years ago

Go's approach to exception handling has a greater impact on the way Go programs are written than the lack of generics. That said, I'm fine with the exception handling because it's obviously a conscious decision by the language designers, and it fits in with the spirit of the language.

The lack of generics doesn't feel like that. It strikes me more as an oversight than anything else. This is especially true because some builtins (i.e. make) are generic functions -- they're just special, and you aren't allowed to make your own.

46Bit• 14 years ago

Similar feelings here, although I've only been playing with it for a week or so. As someone who grew up (literally) on interpreted languages, Go feels far more pleasant to code in than C/C++.

naner• 14 years ago

However, the lack of generics seems like a pretty bad oversight.

The lack of generics was not an oversight but an explicit design decision.

xahrepap2• 14 years ago

Do you have a link to a wiki page or blog post or anything that explains why they decided to omit generics?

sigzero• 14 years ago

Maybe he should have said the lack of generics was a mistake and needs to be corrected?

irahul2• 14 years ago

> It's annoying to rewrite common functional operations (e.g. map, reduce) over and over again with slightly different argument types (or sprinkling type casts all over your code).

Personally I would go with interface{} and type cast.

burntsushi4• 14 years ago

This isn't viable if it's a performance critical portion of your code.

Idiomatic Go (currently) is to use a for loop for map and reduce/fold operations.

diminish• 14 years ago

From the upvotes, apparently Go has a lot of support on HN, and/or there are a lot of Googlers here. I am particularly curious about Go and Ceylon, 2 recent languages with strong corporate backing. Is anyone using Go in a startup? Congratulations to Go open source for 3rd year. Go Go!

lbarrow4• 14 years ago

I work for Braintree -- we've been playing around with Go internally in the last two months, but no production system uses it yet.

The language itself is pretty cool, but most of our work is still web application development (broadly defined). Go isn't particularly suited for that, and even if it were, it doesn't have a mature framework for doing webdev yet.

burntsushi4• 14 years ago

> The language itself is pretty cool, but most of our work is still web application development (broadly defined). Go isn't particularly suited for that, and even if it were, it doesn't have a mature framework for doing webdev yet.

Really? Web development is one of Go's strengths IMO, and the standard library was clearly designed with web development in mind. i.e., the HTML template library, the net/http library, etc.

There are also a few third party frameworks out there. They may or may not be mature depending upon your definition, but gorilla looks promising.

objclxt2• 14 years ago

Soundcloud use Go, as others have mentioned so do CloudFlare, Heroku use it for a few things...there's a list of production users here: http://go-lang.cat-v.org/organizations-using-go

Personally, I've used Go for some prototyping work internally. I thought it was a great language to write in. Sadly I haven't had a chance to do something in production with it myself yet!

I've been keeping a close eye on Revel as well (http://robfig.github.com/revel/), which is a Play-like web framework under active development.

jfaucett• 14 years ago

Great link with revel, it looks promising. I've used Go in production but only for internal things like command line utils for wiring things together. Its a great language especially if your coming from c.

salimmadjd• 14 years ago

up vote for sharing Revel. I added myself to their notification list. Have you compared it against other web framework in Go (I know revel is very young). I also love Go but still searching/waiting for the one web framework that will emerge. I almost wonder if google should put their weight behind one just to reduce chances of further fragmentization.

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

Even if I tend to criticize the decision to leave out generics, my congratulations to the Go team for their work.

afhof• 14 years ago

Its nice to see my name in the Contributors file. I found that submitting patches was easy and said patches were quickly reviewed.

What isn't easy is reading and understanding the documentation. The jump between the Go tour and the Go docs is gaping. I wish some five star technical writers would take a look and fix it since I feel that is Go's biggest problem right now.

kingfishr• 14 years ago

Really? I feel pretty much the exact opposite way. I find the docs to be thorough, accurate, and concise.

chime• 14 years ago

I wish the docs included basic examples of how to use various packages and functions. I end up searching for golang packageX example instead. And often I end up on StackOverflow where someone else is using it wrong and ten others are trying to correct them.

drivebyacct23• 14 years ago

I completely agree, but only after a good read of Effective Go and honestly the language spec. The language spec is documented and completely, completely readable. I have no doubt it's a result of the simplicity driven by the simple/fast compiler. Just seeing the examples get you in the Go states of mind and prepare you for the standard library.

I do think that sometimes the more complex packages are aided by examples and I think the std lib could take on a few more examples. Fortunately, http://gobyexample.com someone is already doing that.

eikenberry• 14 years ago

Between The Go tour and the Go reference does is the Effective Go guide. It gets you going pretty well with lots of practical examples and patterns of how to do things in Go.

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

z3phyr2• 14 years ago

In 2010, there was a poll between haskell and go. That time, haskell won.... Why not have this poll again?

pjmlp3• 14 years ago

+1 Haskell

z3phyr2• 14 years ago

+1 Haskell

+1 to you pjlmp

Haskell We Love You

Go turns three

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