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by mercantile 3072 days ago
> If your career consists of Ruby->Node.js->Go then static binaries are radical new technology.

Rather than offer what amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem, perhaps you’d care to explain why whatever you’re using is superior.

Your preference may be containers or bytecode bundles, but you’d be hard pressed to justify a major advantage and add a lot of complexity overhead for the privilege of using them.

1 comments

> Rather than offer what amounts to nothing more than an ad hominem

Is this ad hominem? Why?

We can both agree to this and agree that Go's compile speed makes very large code bases possible (and that its cross-compile story is very compelling when your entire world revolves around writing on OSX machines and running in a linux docker container.

Lots of languages can deliver big static binaries. Hell, once upon a time this was considered a disadvantage and languages like Common Lisp and Smalltalk were totally raked over the coals for having an image & executable model!

> but you’d be hard pressed to justify a major advantage and add a lot of complexity overhead for the privilege of using them.

Why then is Go given this?

Because I could name 3 languages equally deserving right off the bat and one of them would be way less work: Kotlin, Swift and Haskell.