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by ts4z 1656 days ago
I disagree. Go provides a low-runtime way of writing programs, like C, without having to resort to managing memory and threads super carefully. No VM, no interpreter, fairly straightforward to imagine what the compiler is doing.

You can do the same work in Java but you can't statically link the JVM. You can sort of do these in Python, but the compiler story is murky at best, and the language isn't as type safe.
1 comments
saghm 1656 days ago
> No VM, no interpreter

That's not quite accurate; there is a runtime, it just gets statically linked into the binary instead of needing to be externally installed

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throwaway894345 1656 days ago
No, Go literally doesn't have a VM or an interpreter. VMs and interpreters are runtimes, but not all runtimes are VMs or interpreters. Go executes native code.
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eternalban 1655 days ago
Any language that performs work not directly specified by the user has a runtime. Go's runtime is minimal and concerned with two important aspects of the language: scheduler, and garbage collection.
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throwaway894345 1655 days ago
Yes, I understand. I was responding to someone who was arguing that it was inaccurate to say that Go lacked a VM or interpreter. Yes, Go has a runtime, but that doesn't imply that it has a VM or interpreter (it doesn't).
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