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by umanwizard 2816 days ago
My personal problem with Go is that it doesn’t fit in any niche.

If you want language optimized for productivity with a lot of high-level features, use Python. If you want maximum performance and low-level control, use C++ (or C, or Rust). If you need relatively high performance but can tolerate it not being 100% in exchange for nice things like GC, use Java. Where does Go fit?

2 comments

If we're being serious here, I'm pretty sure Go is specifically for very very large orgs and almost no-one else. Go optimises for low GC pause time, fast compile times and in-your-face concurrency at the expense of almost everything else. The fact that CSP is formalised and well studied, and the lang itself is sufficiently C-like and stripped down makes it amenable to large scale static analysis as well.
If you need relatively high performance but can tolerate it not being 100% in exchange for nice things like GC, use Go. Where does Java fit in?
Java has existed for dramatically longer than Go and is extremely well-supported, both in terms of the core language and the tooling ecosystem.

You need a good reason to get rid of the incumbent, it's not just arbitrary.

IMO there are plenty of reasons for me not to use Java. I could write an essay on it, but the only one that really matters is that for the 4 years that I coded in Java, I didn't enjoy it.

And to suggest Go doesn't offer anything different to Java is just silly.

Curious, what does it offer other than the goroutines and the native compilation?