Just Use Go

https://blainsmith.com/articles/just-fucking-use-go/

by xngbuilds • 3 months ago

226 215 3 months ago

blainsmith.com

ChocolateGod• 3 months ago

necessary for a CRUD app that does maybe forty requests a second.

That's a DoS attack in the python world.

alexander2002• 3 months ago

Lately using go is becoming attractive to me also this seems a sign to take the plunge

worldsayshi• 3 months ago

I often think of go as a "better" python. As in, easy to learn and easy to use. But also performant and the module system and package manager seem to be a little neater. (sorry for flamebait)

But I wonder how well it can cover similar use cases? Go is great for devops and web backends. But what about AI and data science?

chubot• 3 months ago

If Go interfaced with C as well as Python, I’d use it a lot more.

But I’m using the slower language because it still integrates with more things

For example, one reason AI is all in Python is because CUDA is basically part of the C ecosystem (ie build system)

impulser_• 3 months ago

Have you tried purego?

You can just embed the C library into the binary of the Go app call it directly in Go. Most of the time I have found calling C from Go faster or on par with calling C from Python.

https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

tardedmeme• 2 months ago

Go interfaces with C better than Python does...

jochem9• 2 months ago

I used to do lots of data engineering in Python, then started doing all kinds of engineering in primarily Go.

The Go ecosystem for data is very limited. There are no widely supported dataframe libraries (like the og pandas and the newer polars written in rust and also available as a crate). Very few data science libs, a few decent gen AI libraries, but not as popular as their Python cousins.

Most of the work I do now is streaming data and very small batches. For that Go is amazing. I don't need dataframes to transform a json, combine it with a bunch of other data and write to a database. I just need to write that logic and make it go fast. Very easy in Go.

twic3• 3 months ago

The boring choice is the right choice. It always was.

Right, absolutely correct, Java is a great choice, so why does this post keep going on about Go?

mey• 3 months ago

Where my brain went.

baalimago2• 3 months ago

Lack of extensive standard library, for one. But yeah Java is pretty great. Spring boot/quarkus especially

vhodges• 3 months ago

EJB, Spring, Ant, Struts (I'm getting old - Like Hot Java Alpha 3 and Java applets old), maven, pom files, etc.

I used to love Java but the complexity merchants showed up and ruined the party. 1.5 was just coming out when I stopped doing Java dev. Kotlin might pull me back into the fold though for when I can't use Go.

jeberle• 3 months ago

The good stuff landed in Java 8, so you left the party too early. From Java 8 on it has changed direction completely (less OO + JavaBeans, more functional + ADTs). It feels like a completely different language from the Java 1.4 / 5 days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history#Java_SE_8...

therealdrag03• 3 months ago

You can write apps without that stuff? Sure you should have 1 dependency management system, but otherwise you can write clean JVM apps in many languages, without DI or much else.

twic3• 3 months ago

jeberle made a completely factual reply to this, but people hate Java so much it's downvoted to dead.

twic3• 3 months ago

That was a long and dark time in history. We're still in the shadow of it. But these days a much better world is available - a more powerful language, good libraries, and much, much simpler frameworks.

To be clear, all the annotation and Java EE stuff is still going if you want it!

bccdee3• 3 months ago

My big issue with Go is, the language just isn't that great. Zero values instead of sum types, reflection instead of proper macros, a mediocre module system…

Java's warts are far worse than Go. Everything is nullable. There's no module system to speak of. It's so IDE-dependant.

I agree with the spirit of "use boring technology." So thank god Go is boring enough that I don't have to write Java anymore.

za3faran4• 2 months ago

Everything is nullable

Only reference types, the same as in golang (which also has nullable pointers, and its interfaces interact weirdly with null). Java is getting value types, which can be declared as non-nullable.

There's no module system to speak of.

https://dev.java/learn/modules/

It's so IDE-dependant.

Modern Java has been simplified that you can run a hello world program as follows:

  $ cat Hello.java
    void main() {
        IO.println("Hello");
    }
  $ java Hello.java
  Hello

Furthermore, any non-trivial project is better served with an IDE, regardless of language.

gib444• 3 months ago

Well, Spring (Boot) is so hard to avoid running into at day jobs. And Spring is hell.

ptdorf• 2 months ago

Go probably wouldn't exist if Java devs went easy on overengineering design patterns.

But overall Java, like Go, IS a boring language. And that's a compliment.

perarneng• 3 months ago

With agentic coding you can just use Rust. AI agents are really good at Rust and the good error message the compiler and or borrow checker gives makes it easy for the AI agent to adjust its code and fix it.

For non agentic coding Go has terrible error handling. It does not have exceptions or monadic error handling. Some call that a feature but many avoid Go or that specific reason. This will not change because that debate has been settled so if you can live with if err != nil after each function call (almost) then you are fine.

Things that is beautiful with Go are: * Its simplicity * Superb cross compilation support and excellent support for many different OS/arch combos. Not sure if anything comes close to this level of easy way of compiling to Many targets and target support.

kibwen• 3 months ago

Not sure if anything comes close to this level of easy way of compiling to Many targets and target support.

Cross-compilation has been a standard feature of every compiled language toolchain for the past decade at least.

dboreham• 3 months ago

Also a big plus for Go: no async.

mountainriver• 3 months ago

Exactly, I don’t know why we are even arguing over this anymore. People basically don’t write code today so why not use the best languages?

Go is handicapped in significant ways which were specifically designed so that it was easier for humans to write. People pushing for Go code in this age either don’t understand the future or the past

clumsysmurf• 3 months ago

After a few years of Kotlin, I recently ran into what I consider to be some shortcomings here as well, with respect to returning errors. As we know, Kotlin does not have checked exceptions. Ok, but ...

The KEEP for Result<T> goes into details, but basically there are a few ways of handling return values + errors:

1) throw exception if something goes wrong

2) return null if something goes wrong (stdlib XXXorNull)

3) Use Result<T> in some cases, its error type is not paramerized and catches CancellationException

4) Use Arrow if Result<T> doesn't meet your needs

5) Return Sealed Classes / Interfaces with all the possibilities.

Right now, I am going the Sealed Class interface route, but its such a verbose pain in the ass, so I only use it at certain levels of abstraction (like from a Repository, or library API, etc).

The code I needed to write was calling into okio, and it was not straightforward to figure out what kinds of exceptions would be thrown by the JVM layer underneath (docs just say IOException, but sublasses can be thrown).

Its sad to see they still haven't figured this out. Rich Errors was mentioned a year ago but its not even in preview yet. Its also not clear how it will work with Java interop.

Einenlum• 3 months ago

I personally avoid Go because if the if err != nil But I love the fact they have no exceptions. Rust handles this very well but it's way more complicated in general. I feel like we miss a middle ground. Maybe when Gleam becomes really popular, it could be the one?

2ndorderthought4• 3 months ago

Go is fine for simple applications especially backend ones that connect to the internet. I do prefer it to node/js/ts/etc.

I do think a lot of projects would be better served having been written in go instead of java, or whatever else.

I don't think it's a panacea for anything. It's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot with. The easy stuff is easy the hard stuff is really hard.

I like rust a little more, and I don't rewrite things with it. I choose it first. That's my preference but go ahead and gopher on.

baalimago2• 3 months ago

I read this, as my computer crashed while compiling a 1000 dependency CRUD rust app, for the fourth time today. Then I take a deep breath.

estebank2• 3 months ago

If the toolchain crashed while compiling, please file a ticket! That shouldn't happen ever and if it does it is indicative of a big problem that needs fixing.

codegeek• 3 months ago

I love Go. But I prefer .NET for web development that also compiles to a binary and has a great ecosystem of libraries and packages. Go is great if standard library works (and it can for many cases) but when you need to start looking into non standard libraries, Go can hit limitations.

For example, to build a full production web application with database in Go, there is no great out of the box migration tool. There are some good 3rd party libraries of course but compared to something like EFCore in .NET, they don't come as close.

For me, it is now .NET and then Go. Of course, I use Go when just doing a lot of non web stuff as well.

bronlund• 3 months ago

Comparing Go and .NET is like comparing a Honda with an aircraft carrier with wheels.

MarkSweep• 3 months ago

Eh, at least for people consuming .NET apps compiled with NativeAOT, the experience is similar. Applications can be compiled as a single file with no dependancies. A hello world in .NET is half the size of one in Go:

https://github.com/MichalStrehovsky/sizegame

cloudfudge7• 3 months ago

that also compiles to a binary

"compiles to a binary" is not a useful criterion. The criterion Go is winning on is "compiles to a single, completely self-contained binary," meaning it does not depend on libc or any external runtime. You can't say that about .NET. You can't say that about damn near any other programming language. It's extremely rare. The fact that .NET uses a binary packaging format is, like... well ok, so what?

kevinmgranger2• 3 months ago

.Net can compile to a self-contained binary: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/deploying/nati...

treis2• 3 months ago

There's a lot of merit in this. I call Go the Honda Odyssey Minivan of the programming world. It doesn't do anything exceptionally well but it does lots really well and in a way that's simple and reliable. Especially for the backend serving react front end niche.

But it's also a pig to write and comes with a lot of foot guns. Especially the Null handling. Somehow they made it worse than every other language.

lanstin5• 3 months ago

Nilaway linter FTW here.

a012• 3 months ago

Why the Null handling and in Go is worse than others?

treis2• 3 months ago

It sets primitives to 0, "", false etc. Which is almost always but not always fine. And if they're complex objects you still get NPEs

To get true nullable fields you need to use pointers. That's a whole topic in itself but they're awkward.

It's much worse than true nullable objects that your compiler can check for NPEs. It throws fewer NPEs but at the expense of data integrity where you don't know if your 0 is actually a 0 from the user or a null.

MintPaw• 3 months ago

I think there's a large subset of programmers now who consider null checking (or even the existence of null) to be bad, and prefer something else like exceptions or option types. I don't get it personally.

kevinmgranger2• 3 months ago

Another reason why it's worse is how it breaks logical laws thanks to the nil interface bug: https://go.dev/doc/faq#nil_error

Well, they'll call it a design decision, not a bug. I guess I'm being charitable.

oconnor663• 3 months ago

Some weird nils don't compare equal to other nils. It's surprisingly easy to construct the weird kind by accident, because the conversion is automatic and invisible.

shrubble• 3 months ago

Not mentioned is that Gemini does a pretty good job of writing Go in my experience of using it to generate utility scripts, and a friend’s use of generating an internal website for using a corporate API.

linsomniac• 3 months ago

I've typically leaned towards Python for my agentic programming, because the LLMs have been good at it and I'm familiar with it if I need to take a look. But I'm just finishing up an apt-cacher replacement and decided to use golang and the experience has been really great.

I'm using CC+Opus 4.7 max effort, and it's produced a working apt cacher from the first phase of development, so far there have only been a few things I've had to ask it to fix. This is over ~52KLOC (counted by "wc -l"), going on day 3 of it working on it. This includes: caching proxy, garbage collection, "http://HTTPS///" kludge (apt-cacher-ng semantics), MITM https proxy, admin website + metrics, deep validation of metadata and rejecting invalid updates, snapshots of upstream state and delayed metadata update until "hot packages" are available after metadata update...

10/10, would go again.

FYI: My agent loop is: "Work on next step, have codex review it, compact", and then a couple rounds at the end of a phase to review the code against the spec, and a couple rounds at the beginning of a phase to create the spec.

krona• 3 months ago

Go's Webassembly story is a joke at the moment, so no.

tnelsond4• 3 months ago

Yeah, C is king right now.

sudb• 3 months ago

Maybe some common complaints about Go are finally less of a problem in the current coding agent era - e.g. ecosystem weakness complaints and verbose error handling.

Though TypeScript's type system is maybe still more powerful - and therefore might have the edge for agents writing code? (Not to mention there's probably more TypeScript in the training data for LLMs, though perhaps there's _better quality_ Go - I'm not a Go dev though so I couldn't comment further on this.)

runarberg2• 3 months ago

I know this is nitpicky, but whenever I see Go code I see those capitalized function or variable names and know: “aha, these were imported from another file; or will be exported later” and I think to my self: “why? oh why is that relevant information for my at this point in the code?” and I just think about what kind of a weird ill thought out design decision that was, just to save authors from writing an “export” keyword, and further judge the rest of the language predicting it must have more weird design decisions in it.

thomascgalvin• 3 months ago

I like go, but a lot of little things stop me from loving it.

Like, enums. I get a lot out of the box when I use an enum in Java or Kotlin. Converting to/from a String is trivial. Type safety ... exists.

I can do that in Go, but I have to hack it in, for every single enum type I want to represent. Enums are not a thing in the language, which means its easier to keep the language in your brain all at once, but at the expense of making it harder to keep the software I'm writing in my head. Is this "enum" the same as that "enum"? I have to go read the code to figure it out.

But Go is excellent at a lot of things. Compile times, static binaries, resources compiled right into that binary, execution speed ... there is a lot to love.

ntrianta90• 3 months ago

I really wish they had added Enums instead of the stupid generics.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

I would already be happy with enumerations Pascal style from 1976, without the const/iota dance.

nick_4• 3 months ago

The convention of explicit error handling after every method call is absolutely bonkers to me. I would never use it for anything serious.

therealdrag03• 3 months ago

I recently vibe coded a large app in Go, it’s so mind-numbing to read. Like half the code base is error handling.

binaryturtle4• 3 months ago

Go, similar to Rust, has a horrible ecosystem, IMHO. I want to like it, but they already broke backwards compatibility with older systems (try to get the Go compiler running on a slightly older OS X, f.ex.), and for a compiler that's a no-go to me.

jvanderbot• 3 months ago

I regret to inform you, but the post was not about maintaining old systems, it was about simplicity in creating services using a language purpose-designed for creating services. The modern underlying os/docker image was kind of a baked-in assumption.

binaryturtle4• 3 months ago

The post was about Go and uses the "The boring choice is the right choice." point at the end. But a compiler that's so quick to abandoned previously perfectly fine supported systems, and basically is bleeding edge, is anything but the "boring right choice". I personally prefer long term stability in the toolchains I use for my projects at least.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 3 months ago

Isn't that the same thing that Homebrew does? It only has CI for the last couple of Mac OS X versions. Seems like this is more of an issue with Mac OS X architecture than Go.

binaryturtle4• 3 months ago

Dunno about Homebrew (haven't used that since many years for various reasons), but Apple is certainly pushing things in a way that makes 3rd party developers quickly abandon old systems too. That's true. At least lots of 3rd party developers are very quick to give up if their new Xcode will not cooperate.

boxed2• 3 months ago

A dig at Django's ORM seems hilarious. I wonder how many SQL injection vulnerabilities are written daily by Go devs.

leetrout2• 3 months ago

sqlc is pretty darn great but it's no comparison to Django. Django has its own problems and I would love for it to take some lessons from sqlc.

Really hate we don't have proper type hints for Django.

rick1290• 3 months ago

Is django the best backend batteries included framework at the moment?

xRyen• 3 months ago

I still can understand the attraction with having the same language and codebase if you need a deeper level of interactivity on the frontend. That's where Node shines.

nohell• 3 months ago

archived: https://nonogra.ph/just-fucking-use-go-05-08-2026

elevation• 3 months ago

and doesn't shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm

For non-trivial golang apps you're still gonna find npm in the mix. I recently packaged forgejo, yopass, and a few others, and if you don't have `npm` on the build machine, the resulting daemon won't serve the front end.

jryio• 3 months ago

I wrote about this here [1]

The big idea with LLMs is consistent references in the training corpus produced cheddar output by the language model during inference.

Go is an amazing language for language models because it's actually quite boring predictable while packing a lot of powerful distractions with a world class tool chain supported by Google and strong std library as well.

As a programmer I actually hated writing Go... and wanted to write Rust; but using coding agents makes me appreciate writing Go more.

I can get consistent results out while having concurrency cross compilation and predictability.

https://jry.io/writing/ai-makes-golang-one-of-the-best-langu...

bschwindHN• 3 months ago

the race detector will tell you when you screwed up.

lol

if err != nil {

lmao

defer rows.Close()

Oh dear

...

I'm only poking fun, I'll take a go backend any day over most of the alternatives. Same goes for CLI tools.

azangru2• 3 months ago

I know it doesn't matter, but...

...who invented this letter-casing convention?

    import (
        "embed"
        "html/template"
        "net/http"
    )

    //go:embed templates/*.html
    var files embed.FS

    var tmpl = template.Must(template.ParseFS(files, "templates/*.html"))

why is the name of a module lower-cased

but the names of functions accessed via its namespace upper-cased?

how does this make sense?

lanstin5• 3 months ago

Upper case symbols in a module are exported. Everything else should be lower case.

azangru2• 3 months ago

Oh; in that case the lowly Javascript/typescript does this so much cleaner with the explicit `export` keyword. "Explicit is better than implicit."

antonvs4• 3 months ago

If you like a sort of weakly-typed version of Python or PHP, use Go. As the article points out it can be good for web forms. Not all development is web forms.

em-bee3• 3 months ago

how is go a weakly typed version of python or php? or even more generic, how is go weakly typed? explain please.

zbentley3• 3 months ago

I suspect that this is breaking type systems out onto separate axes: strong/weak and static/dynamic. Many consider Python to be strong/dynamic.

leetrout2• 3 months ago

Strange position to take. Python and Go are both duck typed but given Go has compile time type checking it is providing another layer of safety. Could you add more detail supporting your stance?

antonvs4• 2 months ago

I expressed that poorly. I'm saying Go adds a weak type system. Too weak for its own good. No sum types is the first dealbreaker. Even C had unions.

BadBadJellyBean5• 3 months ago

I can write go but I don't prefer it. It's ... okay.

Things I dislike:

- if err != nil. Just give me some syntactic sugar instead of letting me write the same thing a bajillion time.

- no way to bind a struct to an interface. I'd like my IDE to tell me when I accidentally stopped implementing an interface

- some stdlib parts are too bare bones. Unpacking an archive requires me to handle all files, directories, links, etc. myself. There is no move command that can move a file or directory across fs boundaries. The little things.

calcifer2• 3 months ago

I'd like my IDE to tell me when I accidentally stopped implementing an interface

I don't know about others, but Goland's analyser is pretty powerful and can navigate from interface to implementation(s) and vice versa.

BadBadJellyBean5• 3 months ago

In my experience only when you implement it correctly. If I add a new method to the interface I can't navigate to the implementations anymore because they don't completely implement the interface.

avanai• 3 months ago

    var _ MyInterface = &MyStruct{}

Now your compiler will tell you you stopped implementing the interface. Pretty? No. But it works. And gopls will even offer to implement stubs for missing methods.

BadBadJellyBean5• 3 months ago

That is helpful but I think that is still a fail for Go. This could and should be a simple annotation.

pdmccormick• 3 months ago

This also works:

    var _ MyInterface = (*MyStruct)(nil)

In my mind as I read this, I am reminded that it is the receiver type *MyStruct that implements MyInterface. YMMV.

MichaelNolan• 3 months ago

Hmm, they misspelled Gleam.

In seriousness, Go is a good choice. Or at least it’s not a bad choice, I’d definitely pick go over many other languages. If go had a better type system, it would be damn near perfect.

chuckadams5• 3 months ago

I'll grit my teeth and tolerate "if err != nil" if I have to, but null pointers are where I get off the train.

giraffe_lady• 3 months ago

Hey, dipshit. You know what compiles in two seconds, deploys as a single binary, and doesn't shit itself when a transitive dependency gets yanked from npm at 3am?

OCaml?

xnorswap4• 3 months ago

I can't see any reason this list why I should use Go over C# / .NET.

.NET has almost all these upsides, but with a concurrency model (async/await) that is (now) more transferable to other languages.

shantnutiwari3• 3 months ago

Agreed-- c# has a lot of these advantages and is a lot easier to write (yes, I know this will depend). Plus it has a much larger ecosystem

The only thing I can think of: I dont think c# can compile as easy to a single executable binary, like Go (or even rust)?

xnorswap4• 3 months ago

It's had support for single exe compilation for a while now, although the file sizes can get large without being more careful about dependencies.

stackskipton• 3 months ago

.Net SRE here, you can do self contained executable but there is some foot guns there and if you are doing containers already, I'd just skip it.

2ndorderthought4• 3 months ago

I can see reasons why people don't want to use .NET if Go is available. .NET has its merits but it's bloated, compilation is slow, and I find it's tooling to be really annoying.

For me go is just above c# and both of those are not super high on my list.

xnorswap4• 3 months ago

I've never understood what is meant by "bloated", would you mind explaining, so perhaps I could better understand?

If it's "Large standard library", I think that's a selling point. Having anything you need available ( although these days, via optional microsoft.* packages ) helps keep projects consistent between different places.

If it means "Different ways to do the same thing", I can understand that criticism better, and some of that comes with 20+ years of legacy, where the wrong thing was done, and now there's a better way, but a ruthless adherence to backward compatibility means that the old way isn't dropped.

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

I only have one reason, devops ecosystem where Go is expected nowadays, like plugins for something.

Otherwise Java, .NET, Typescript (with possible C++ addons).

nathanasmith• 3 months ago

I start out writing most of my terminal applications and utilities in Python but when something hits a performance ceiling I convert it to Go. That's been a pretty good bar for when it's time to use Go for me and so far so good.

0xbadcafebee• 3 months ago

Since AI coding, I've switched 90% of my code to Go. It's really great for most things. Lacks a development community large enough to have a really solid UI framework, but the existing frameworks are "good enough". I used AI to make an AI agent that works on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android, with CLI, GUI, and web serving. LOC: 5575. Binary size: 35MB.

Also: why can't we vouch for flagged stories now? This post is actually good, and funny, and the conversations are worth having.

Hamuko• 3 months ago

I got turned off of Go pretty fast by GOPATH shenanigans and polluting my home directory for no reason, since I don't think a programming language should really have any say on my filesystem.

Error handling also seems pretty dumb in comparison to Rust. Admittedly Rust is a much more complicated language, but I felt like I could just go learn more Rust instead of bothering with Go and have more fun.

zbentley3• 3 months ago

Doesn't Rust/Cargo dump stuff into your home directory as well? https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/environment-variab...

Like, if the gripe is that Go should be better about following XDG conventions, fair enough. But pretty much every language other than C, C++, and Node tends to use system paths for transitives/compilation artifacts/registries/downloads.

bee_rider• 3 months ago

How well does Go handle GPGPU?

dadoum• 3 months ago

I would like someone to explain me Go. Really, I will use strong words but that's really what I feel.

The syntax changes a lot from the C one, and I can't see any reason for it. To me, it looks unstructured, with the lack of colons for example. It ignores memory safety, it feels like it ignored all of the typing system research since C, no discriminated union, and structures and types in general are heavy to write. It encourages bad patterns, errors out on mundane things like an unused variable, forces you to handle errors with a lot of code while not catching much more than C in terms of bug-prone practices. The package/module system is a nightmare for contributing to open source projects. Modifying a dependency to find a bug is very hard, even swapping a dependency (version) is annoying.

And what do you get from all of this compared to C? A garbage collector, tuples, and goroutines. No metaprogramming (aside from generics, and that was a whole story), interop with C is limited. To me, it looks like it does not focus on the algorithms, but on the code implementation, which is imo what leads us into poor programming and missing critical logic flaws, because the logic is buried. I may have forgotten other gripes I got while working with Go, but honestly, if I wanted all of that, I would pick D, at least it interops well with C and has metaprogramming (and has been made earlier, which excuses a little the lack of certain things).

But really, I am open to someone explaining me how they enjoy Go. Because I feel like I should be wrong as I see most people (which, for some of them, I know are clever) praise Go.

Edit: I added modal expressions to make it clear that it is my opinion.

lanstin5• 3 months ago

I like it because I have more control over the size and layout of my memory structures than many GC languages, and the goroutine/channel data flow design model lets me use all the cores pretty evenly without having to worry about mutexes or subtleties. Pretty easy to get into the 100k request per second performance regime without special tweaking. I tend to either write long lived servers where the performance per container directly affects the cost, or analytics sort of Calais where I want my laptop to use 1/2 or 3/4 of its cores and get a faster answer from scraping 10M whatevers.

sliken• 2 months ago

C, for better or worse, is like a high level assembly language. You can do anything, which pretty much means you are going to have many security and correctness issues. Double free, use after free, off by one errors, buffer overflows, etc. Thus numerous CVEs.

Go has less flexibility, no pointer arithmetic, a healthy package system, and a smaller domain. Mostly consuming or providing network services. My favorite feature is channels. For me they make levering the performance of multi-core CPUs straight forward, and dramatically nicer than the C approaches I've tried like pthreads and mutexes.

I wouldn't rate go as secure as rust, but has a pleasingly developer friendly approach. Seems way more secure than C.

Making a pipeline where each stage is 1 to N threads is pleasingly easy, reliable, and performant.

agentultra• 3 months ago

I should write one of these for Haskell. Huffing abstractions is great for boring, line-of-business applications.

Goroutines? Meh. Software transactional memory and green threads? Heck yeah.

An actual type system? Chef's kiss.

Scott Wlaschin from the F# world has written and talked extensively about F# for "boring" software. It works equally well in Haskell. You don't need to use type-level meta programming to spit out a basic service.

Monads are a great honking idea, btw.

estebank2• 3 months ago

Please don't, at least not mimicking the "edgy 13 year old thinks it comes across as cool" tone.

room271• 2 months ago

Goroutines are green threads.

rvz• 3 months ago

Go or Rust in 2026 is the standard go to and I never looked back on anything else.

I would not consider anything else without a good reason and especially never going for Javascript or TypeScript for anything server related.

barnabee2• 3 months ago

Now that LLMs can breeze through the Rust boilerplate there's no reason to ever write Go again.

It's one of the dullest, most mediocre languages out there and despite a nice toolchain and the fact it's undoubtedly a "safe" choice, I just have zero interest.

OutOfHere• 3 months ago

Someone has to review the LLM generated code. If it's not the developer, it's the SRE at 2 am. For someone without significant experience, it might be harder to review Rust than Go.

barnabee2• 3 months ago

Not sure it's harder. Rust type system makes it much harder to shoot yourself in the foot with nils and errors, at least. Biggest issue is probably the number of 3rd party dependencies every non-trivial Rust app ends up needing.

pjmlp8• 2 months ago

I bet if Rust was more mature back then, the Python to Go rewrite from Docker, and the Java to Go rewrite from Kubernetes would both have been into Rust instead, and that would be it.

killbot5000• 3 months ago

I love go, but I find it did little to make concurrency management easier to reason about. Race conditions are easy to write. Go routines have all the same concurrency problems of threads.

In the parallel HTTP fetcher, the error is discarded. This will likely result in a panic when the response is nil. Also, what if it a server locks up? Or the underlying socket never connects and never times out?

I know it’s a toy example, but one must consider all these things in a real system. Go does have good pathways for these concerns, but it’s also easy to do it wrong. I still have to manually reason about access to variables/struct fields from multiple go routines.

lanstin5• 3 months ago

I find I have to design servers from a data flow view; when my performance demands let me do everything via channels to worker goroutine pools (including sending a response Channel back to the request handler) I don’t have to do any locking at all. I find when I have to add in mutexes it means I haven’t thought enough about the problem (or I am fixing some hot spot from the profiler, rarely).

jesseschalken3• 2 months ago

Its absolutely laughable that Gophers act like their language solves concurrency when its actually worse than Java because it has data races. Go added nothing and moved backwards.

The language that actually solves concurrency is Rust, but they will never acknowledge that.

jcgrillo• 3 months ago

if err != nil is the feature, not the bug. It forces you to look at every place something can go wrong and decide what to do about it.

It truly does not.

shantnutiwari3• 3 months ago

Why is this flagged? Because of the swearing? Cause there have been previous posts with swearing in them? Or do people in general hate Go so much?

I know the OP said dont use external libraries, but I love bubble tea (And their related libs), they are a great reason to use Go for TUI

that said, I only use Go for hobby projects, I dont know how good it feels if you have to use it for work 40 hours a week

indigodaddy2• 3 months ago

It's likely being flagged because people believe it's more AI-written than not

shantnutiwari3• 3 months ago

Let me copy paste my other comment:

"This is getting really fucking irritating. Every 3rd comment on every HN post is "This is LLM", which has become a proxy for "I dont like it so it must be llm"

mattgreenrocks• 3 months ago

I am so over the presumptive blog post tone personally.

chuckadams5• 3 months ago

Maybe because the style is just worn-out ragebait trolling now.

djray• 3 months ago

Just fucking use the language appropriate to the task you're trying to accomplish.

Just fucking use the language your colleagues can understand and support for the next few years.

Just fucking use the language with the framework and tooling you need to get your job done efficiently and effectively, and one at the appropriate level of abstraction for the project.

Just fucking use the language which AI agents can read and write well, because we're in the End Times and this stuff matters.

Just fucking use the language with great testing and CI/CD support because you'll be spending longer supporting your code than writing it.

The skill is choosing well, and a key realisation is that it's never a one-size-fits-all thing. That's why an article like this is less than helpful, gosh darn it.

Ukv4• 3 months ago

`if err != nil` is the feature, not the bug. It forces you to look at every place something can go wrong and decide what to do about it

Haven't really used Go, but can't someone just `result, _ := foo()` and go on using `result`, not checking any errors?

The way Rust does it seems closer to forcing you to handle any errors in order to obtain the result (though it is still easy to just `.unwrap()` without properly thinking about it).

chuckadams5• 3 months ago

We do want to check for errors, we'd just prefer that it not be a repeated 3-line boilerplate pattern that ends up being >50% of all code. Rust does it with one character.

Ukv4• 3 months ago

I agree that Rust's approach is better. I'm questioning the claim that Go "forces you" to handle errors, since to my understanding with Go someone can just eschew that 3-line boilerplate, silently ignoring the error, and still use the result (which is bad).

therealdrag03• 3 months ago

Personally, I don’t want to swallow errors I want to throw them. 90% of the time, I have a few small cross-cutting points (like an api controller) I want to catch and handle exceptions that get thrown from the rest of the code base.

Koffiepoeder• 3 months ago

Hey dipshit,

Maybe I develop games. Maybe I develop IoT devices. I might even be working in a high-stakes environment where formal verification is needed, who knows.

Whatever the case may be, we all have our reasons for choosing certain technologies. Not everyone is building run-of-the-mill 'backends' after all.

So please, let's stuff that neckbeardy arrogance away. It serves no purpose and distracts from the discussion.

Thanks.

P. s. I develop my backends in go.

yomismoaqui• 3 months ago

The best feature of Gon is that it is boring.

You cose something and if you don't use some weird 3rd party packages (Go stdlib is quite complete) you can check that code again in 3 years and will still work.

doodoostew• 3 months ago

I've worked on large Go codebases on large teams at large orgs with large dreams. That garbage us straight up unmaintainable in the large and nobody can convince me otherwise. I have deep knowledge of the language, platform, used it for over a decade. It sucks.

greenavocado• 3 months ago

It sucks because?

4ndrewl3• 3 months ago

Account created one hour ago...

sethammons2• 3 months ago

My experience is directly counter. I've worked in half a dozen very large orgs and moving from interpreted languages to Go in each one made the system easier to reason about, more maintainable, and easier to onboard new team members. Go strikes a balance between all the competing priorities that has, in my personal experience, improved the engineering velocity across half a dozen companies comprised of hundreds of developers each. For two organizations, they made very coupled and hard to reason about code bases, but those were vastly easier to reason about than had they been written in, say, python or ruby.

za3faran4• 2 months ago

Compared to a language like Python or Ruby, yes it's better for larger programs. Compared to the likes C# or Java? Not a chance.

drewbug01• 3 months ago

Your "clever" coworker can't sneak a seventeen-layer abstraction into the codebase because the language won't let him.

Oh boy, the author has clearly not seen some of the Go codebases I’ve seen.

shepherdjerred• 3 months ago

Go is probably my second least favorite language, right behind C++

You need a lot of linters e.g. to make sure errors are being handled, and the lack of algebraic data types make expressing data difficult.

I do think it has merits, but I’ll take type safety over simplicity

librasteve2• 3 months ago

For web stuff, I enjoy https://htmx.org

so Go + Templ + HTMX (aka the GOTH stack)

Or, if you prefer more of a power tools feel, then HTMX and Raku in functional style (https://harcstack.org) maybe to your liking. Which I call the Crotch Rocket of the programming world.

culi• 3 months ago

That looks like a fun stack—especially the Raku—but have you ever actually deployed anything using it?

librasteve2• 3 months ago

Here are some:

  - https://raku.org (dog-fooding)
  - https://harcstack.org
  - https://cragcli.info

It's fairly early days ... but a couple of other Raku community sites are taking it up.

tmaly• 3 months ago

I have been using Go since 2014. I have services that just run without issue.

Having backwards compatibility with 1.0 just makes it easier to maintain software.

The big plus in the modern era is that the simplicity of the language lends to having agents write Go without much fuss. That and the standard library being batteries include lets you direct the agent to use little or no third party dependencies.

binary132• 3 months ago

I’m so tired of AI slop baitposting, guys.

dzonga• 3 months ago

Go is simple, but Rails is pragmatic for web stuff.

dualvariable2• 3 months ago

if err != nil is the feature, not the bug. It forces you to look at every place something can go wrong and decide what to do about it.

No it really doesn't. It litters your code with if statements that are all just about the same, except that one that needs to be different, and you go blind looking at them all and can't spot the difference. And these days people probably just type "tab" and their LLM assistant fills out the entire block incorrectly in one keypress copying the pattern from everything else.

But LLMs didn't create that problem. Having to type something never meant you had to think about it, or thousands of "sudo shutdown -r now" commands would never have been run on production databases, because typing "sudo" would have magically made someone think about it, rather than just being keyboard memory.

And the problem of reviewing the code and spotting the one error handling block that should be different from all the others is always going to be there for human reviewers.

Rust converts the common case boilerplate down into one character: ? which lets you focus on any exceptional error handling rather than a wall of if statements that almost all look alike. And the compiler can see that you're ignoring a Result from a function call and force you to explicitly do something about. Plus you can then use a monad without knowing a single thing about monoids, endofuctors or category theory, and impress your friends.

potato-peeler8• 3 months ago

No it really doesn't. It litters your code with if statements that are all just about the same

Wrong thing to be bothered with. This allows static analysis of every possible path the code can take. Try to do that with throw/catch. There is a reason many industry guidelines like misra, jsf, etc just outright ban hidden paths. They have been literally catastrophic. There is a reason why many modern languages like go, rust, etc, want errors to be explicitly handled.

Go documentation specifically reasons why they treat errors-as-values and why is it like that - https://go.dev/doc/faq#exceptions

Rust converts the common case boilerplate down into one character: ? which lets you focus on any exceptional error handling rather than a wall of if statements that almost all look alike

Again, wrong way to look at errors. Errors are not a problem for a compiler to resolve. Errors are part of your business logic. They need to be explicit and handled. The syntax of one language vs another is not the point of error handling. Errors are not a distraction. It is your job to review each path the code can take.

Code may be written once, but code is always reviewed or audited or referenced more than once. No one is impressed if you write some meta magic one-liner. I would rather be more impressed if I can read your code and form a mental image on how many paths your code takes to achieve an outcome in a single sitting, instead of pinging you for a quick call to explain yourself.

you go blind looking at them all and can't spot the difference
And these days people probably just type "tab" and their LLM assistant fills out the entire block incorrectly in one keypress copying the pattern from everything else

Now, if someone is 'going blind' looking at error checks, its because their function is doing too much and has too many failure points. Perhaps one may need to focus on honing their software engineering skills on how to structure their code, instead of hitting that 'tab' more so often.

jesseschalken3• 3 months ago

Go has plenty of hidden code paths in defer, panic and recover. You can minimise the use of those things, just like in other languages you can minimise use of try-catch in favour of a Result sum type, which is already better than Go's "multiple return that you have to pretend is a sum".

nurettin2• 2 months ago

No one is impressed if you write some meta magic one-liner.

I am very impressed if they can express the entire algorithm succinctly with a one liner. That's the kind of abstraction every piece of code should strive for and be shamed to the ground if they haven't.

I would rather be more impressed if I can read your code and form a mental image on how many paths your code takes to achieve an outcome in a single sitting, instead of pinging you for a quick call to explain yourself.

Does this mean you're impressed by the ability to read go's if spaghetti?

amomchilov• 2 months ago

I agree with all the motives you describe, yet come to the exact opposite conclusion.

The overwhelmingly common case is for an error in a nested call to be bubbled up to be handled by a parent call. If you make this common case look similar to the distinct case of actually handling an error, you just obscure where the real error handling happens.

Writing good error handling is Go is really hindered by two other issues mixing together: 1. There’s no Result type, so while it tries to treat errors as values, it’s missing out on a lot of the benefit of that idea. 2. Multiple function return values are implemented as a special case, and aren’t themselves a value

Most languages that support multiple return values, do it via some notion of tuples: returning a single aggregate value that you can pass around as a whole, but that also have some nice syntax for destructuring them into local variables. Go implements as a syntactic special case.

You can’t assign the multiple return values of a function call into a single variable. You’re forced to take all the parts, and pack them into a struct yourself. This means that you can’t factor your result-handling logic into testable functions, without needing to do this dance at every call site.

dualvariable2• 2 months ago

Wrong thing to be bothered with. This allows static analysis of every possible path the code can take. Try to do that with throw/catch. There is a reason many industry guidelines like misra, jsf, etc just outright ban hidden paths. They have been literally catastrophic. There is a reason why many modern languages like go, rust, etc, want errors to be explicitly handled.

I mean I'm explicitly supporting how rust does it over go, so I don't understand how this is any kind of rebuttal. In your last sentence you admit that rust enforces that errors are explicitly handled, and I think it does it much better than go does, and does it without littering the codebase with boilerplate if statements. The fact that you're launching into an explanation of the insufficiencies of throw/catch exception handling when that has absolutely nothing to do with what I was arguing... Well, I don't feel the need to argue with you any further. Rust also has errors-as-values and doesn't throw (at least not the common case, just like go), so the go FAQ on exceptions isn't relevant to the discussion.

And I'm just going to end the argument with that, since you seem to be a waste of time to deal with.

clausecker3• 2 months ago

No it really doesn't. It litters your code with if statements that are all just about the same, except that one that needs to be different, and you go blind looking at them all and can't spot the difference.

If most of your error handling is just bubbling the error up, you are doing something wrong.

  if err != nil { return err; }

is an antipattern. Not because it's verbose, but because you are supposed to handle the error, not pass it right through, in most cases.

brycewray• 3 months ago

Apropos of nothing: it's interesting that a page pushing Go so emphatically is built[0] using the Rust-based Zola rather than the Go-based Hugo.

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~blainsmith/blog/tree/main/item/.build.yml

pjmlp8• 3 months ago

Yeah, it breaks when the author decides to move from Github into Gitlab to protest against Microsoft.

Time to update all code references to Gitlab across the globe, in every single Go project.

Or spend the time configuring redirects between URL mappings, across everything that depends on it.

Not to mention that except for lacking garbage collection, even Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS was more modern in language features, with faster compile times, on a 20 MHz powered computer.

0xjnml• 2 months ago

Yeah, it breaks when the author decides to move from Github into Gitlab to protest against Microsoft.

The import path is disconnected from where the build system looks for the files. Of course, the default is to use the import path as an URL, right, but nothing forces you to do that. And if you do, *you* lock yourself to the hosting you use. But that can be hardly blamed on Go.

Documentation here: https://pkg.go.dev/cmd/go#hdr-Remote_import_paths

Full example: https://github.com/rsc/swtch/blob/master/app/rsc-io/main.go

tl;dr: Serve this at your domain, update the repo-root when changing host platform for your code: <meta name="go-import" content="import-prefix vcs repo-root">. No one else has to do anything.

pjmlp8• 2 months ago

I am well aware, as you might find out in my comment history all the way back to Go pre 1.0.

Additional work that is superfluous in other mature programming ecosystems, that don't have the dumb idea to use SCM urls as import paths.

pixel_popping• 3 months ago

Rust (just swap the linker) > Go. Thank you, rewrite the article please.

bloody-crow• 3 months ago

Every time I see those kind of posts, it seems reasonable on the surface. But then you remember than a typical web app might want to do something beyond just serving an HTML template.

Like, what if you want some styling or javascript along with your HTML? Either write everything by hand like it's 2003 again, or start inventing a complex pipeline from scratch in Go. Countless of people have spent thousands of man-hours on solving this problem, but you use Go, so now you do this yourself from scratch.

Or maybe your app needs some relatively complex database access? Writing SQL-spaghetti only gets you so far until you need to do conditional joins and unions and parameterized subqueries etc. God forbid you want migrations too. Go has no answer for this and you either have to hand roll all those things as well, or spend tons of time comparing countless libraries that do some of things you want, but not quite everything, or don't fit into your pipeline for whatever reason.

I'd take an opinionated framework with fat dependency stack that has way more features than I'd ever need over trying to reinvent migrations or CSS preprocessing from scratch in Go, thank you very much.

zbentley3• 3 months ago

No base image CVE alerts every Tuesday.

Citation needed. Go's fat binaries and big stdlib cause most enterprise-mandated CVE scanners to light up with zillions of false positives constantly, because too much shit is present in the binary.

Logger package technically could speak protobuf over gopher, even though you use it to write text to syslog? Congrats, gopher and protobuf ecosystems are compiled in, with their vulnerabilities! Multiply that by every single golang binary anywhere in your system (seriously, I was getting CVE alerts for un-hardened stdlib cryptography in a 50loc file copying backup tool that could have been a shell script, and audio format conversion buffer underflow CVEs for Traefik, and many many more for months) and it adds up to a pain in the ass.

And heaven help you if you do actually have a vuln in third-party software that needs to be patched without an upstream fix (usually because "upstream doesn't make distributions on golang-$LATEST or $TRANSITIVE-$LATEST and they have a roadmap item to do that next millenium"). You can't install an updated transitive and fix it, you have to recompile and somehow distribute the whole thing. Doing that is never as simple as "go build" for big projects: the remaining 20% of build/toolchain needs that Go itself doesn't cover are inevitably fulfilled by the same pile of it-works-on-the-maintainer's-machine rickety Makefile bullshit we always had, but without even the sanity and conventions of autoconf and friends--and yeah, building others' Go projects in anger/in a hurry is enough of a pain in the ass that it makes me miss fucking autoconf.

On balance, I like Go. And there's a lot to hate about dynamic linking and package manager hell. But Go's approach is definitely not without its drawbacks in the CVE/security space.

jesseschalken3• 3 months ago

The single executable deployment hasn't been an advantage for a very long time. C# has Native AOT. Java/Kotlin/Scala have GraalVM native-image, plus Kotlin Native and Scala Native.

And of course there is Rust, which compared to Go has better performance, lower memory usage, smaller binaries, safe concurrency, safe resource handling, and a real type system with tagged unions.

The Go team built good tooling around a mediocre language. Now most other languages have caught up, and Gophers are left writing mind numbing `if err != nil` checks with no benefits left to show for it.

kakwa_• 2 months ago

After having way too strong opinions about this, and even if Go is my go to language, I've stopped caring for this kind of statements.

In the end, the language doesn't really matter and extremely rarely is the bottleneck.

Python, Java, Go, C#, PHP, Node, Ruby or Scala, for backend stuff, all these languages can do the work 99% of the time. They all have well developed ecosystems, and are sufficiently mainstream to easily find developers.

In the end, these languages are just variants of the same tool, and I find more interesting to just pick one and build something with it, rather than bickering endlessly about which one is better.

za3faran4• 2 months ago

Basically everything mentioned in the article, and more, is served better with Java or C#.

Just Use Go

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