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by mayhew 3764 days ago
> Go is not general purpose

Can you explain?

1 comments

There is no arguing with Turing equivalence of Go and most other languages but there are practical limitations which prevent more complete general purposeness.

I like Go since the beginning. However, Go cannot be easily used for kernel development, soft or hard real-time or embedded systems (no linker script support and porting runtime is weighty) and there are few transpilers.

Rust is slightly better, because PoC kernels have been put together with fewer hacks. Haskell, C, Ada, assembly are much more general purpose in terms of being able to build something like seL4, an F-15 cockpit, an engine management system or compiling code as ASIC circuitry. (Perl's supposed use in nuclear armaments notwithstanding.)

PS: I would like to see some geninuses come up with a back-back-end to LLVM or a disassembler which could formally prove binary satisfiability of program correctness without mind-bending, gibberish, over-mathematized, incantations inaccessible to us mere, stupid mortals.

Which language doesn't have "practical limitations"? And it's no doubt more "general purpose" than assembly. How much webdev are you going to do with assembly?
Pointers please to someone working on a kernel in Swift... :)