Just Use Go

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It truly does not.

That's a DoS attack in the python world.

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.

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.

...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"))

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

how does this make sense?

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

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.

OCaml?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.