[giovannibajo1]

> - Stdlib just loosely wraps posix features with many C flags copied verbatim. These APIs are old and could use a refresh but Go never bothered. > - Similarly, Go doesnt bother to hide the differences of different OSes.

I disagree with these. Go runtime/stdlib is architected to work around many many POSIX headaches and design bugs, hiding them completely from programmers, and to be fully portable. For instance:

* Concurrency is completely redesigned (goroutines). * Signal handling is redesigned and doesn't cause bugs when interacting with concurrency. * Forking/Exec'ing is redesigned not to cause fd leaks in subprocesses (all file descriptors are marked as O_CLOEXEC, in a race-free way), nor have races while interacting with concurrency * Sockets are exposed through a higher-level API (Dialer/Listener). * epoll is not exposed but transparently used by a single thread to handle all supported file descriptors without wasting OS threads, to improve performance

In fact, I think the only thing that is pretty much low-level is os.File and filesystem access in general, which tends to expose lower-level details.

[brian-armstrong]

Having experienced a situation where I had to call select() directly, I have to completely disagree. If you run into situations like this, you need the syscall escape hatch. It's really painful to get this working, and it interacts poorly with goroutines.

Sockets are actually another good example. If you need to tweak then at all, you get to use the same old horrendous POSIX names for everything. No name aliases?