hellb88ned

> having int be variable-sized allows you to easily have maps or other int-indexed structures that naturally grow in capacity with the current architecture ... Go programming that targets 32-bit ARM CPUs and the performance would be shit if the Go runtime just assumed a 64-bit baseline.

That's why you have a -fint-is-32-bit flag or some way to bend the standard to make it run faster on those system when needed. There's no way Go with it's shared memory between threads is going to survive any future shift to 128-bit computing anyway, so just making int always 64-bit is the best choice; if your maps or indexed structures are so vast then you'll need better abstractions than coroutines.

> [better C than K&R is] basically what Go was meant to be and I suspect the Go team would consider your description of Go to be more flattering than you perhaps meant it to be.

Well it certainly was not intended to be flattering, but I suspect you are correct.

> (int mirrors the native bit-ness of the architecture in Go instead of virtually always being 32-bit like it is in C/C++).

Seriously, in a language designed ~2010 a common "int" variable could be 32-bit? 64-bit should be the minimum because 32-bit is too small to express common values these days. It's 2013, if you actually want a 32-bit integer use int32. Better yet make "int" always be a particular size and use "register_t" or "int_fast_t" similar as a native int.

You can't even assign a smaller type to a larger one in Go without a cast, but you can recompile it on a different arch and, like this program, have it completely fail because the size of the variables changed. And baked-in coroutines so that you won't run out of address space on 32-bit? Really?

Go is so archaic in many ways like this. It's like somebody from the 70s tried to come up with a better C than K&R.

> when he really should have blamed the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Going a layer deeper, blame the competitions themselves. They very rarely have good data sets to actually weed out algorithmically poor solutions, so you can often get away with brute force or mostly brute force solutions -- if you use a low-level programming language.

For instance many times a O(N^2/100) will pass the test data just because it's written in C++ instead of something slower. That's a failure of the test data.