[BillyTheKing]

I've been mostly writing Typescript the past 3 years - and recently started writing code in Go. Initially I was a little apprehensive, lack of array functions, slightly less flexible type-system, etc.

But after spending some time writing Go I now had to re-initialise a typescript project for a small-ish team (4-5 devs). The amount of time spent on things such as linting, selecting the correct library for server routing, the correct server, coding standards, basic error-handling and enforcing it with a custom error or Result type to get out of this nested try/catch hell which still loses the majority of errors. Setting up testing and mocking. Setting up Prisma and what not - and finally the PRs are still a hit and miss, some ok, some make use of weird JS functions..

Don't get me wrong, I really do like Typescript. But I gotta say after all of that it's just great using a language with a fantastic standard library, proper type-safety, with some coding standards built-in. It's obviously not without quirks, but it's pretty decent - and great to see that routing has now also moved into the standard library, another bit that you don't have to worry about - can't wait for some map/filter/find slice functions though!

[KingOfCoders]

In my CTO newsletter I recently wrote about TS vs Go releases, with Go 1.22 as an example. TS gets more and more complicated with each release, catering to the power users. Go adds things that makes it simpler to use, like the (missing) range over integers. It's like game sequels, they add more and more canon and game mechanics, then game sequels (or comics) need to reset to make them more accessible to newcomers again. Programming languages can't do this, so I'm happy that Go keeps this in mind.

[simiones]

All languages that keep evolving get more complex over time. The changes are always intended to make programs written in the language simpler.

Go moves at a pretty slow pace, adding only minor new features (and thus minor complications) in most releases. Even in 1.22, they are previewing a new feature, range-over-functions, which seem to be basically C#/Python's iterator functions - a feature which will, of course, complicate the language - but make certain programs simpler.

As a general rule, the more features a language has, the shorter program that implements a particular algorithm can be, but the harder it is to learn, and the bigger the chance that it will be misunderstood. There are exceptions where certain features make languages more verbose (e.g. access modifiers), but typically only in minor ways.

[KingOfCoders]

"range-over-functions"

Yes, something people coming to Go would have assumed worked before looking at all range cases, but didn't.

[simiones]

range-over-functions is the experimental new feature where a function can generate a sequence by executing a bit at a time, i.e.

  s := []string{"hello", "world"}
  for i, x := range slices.Backward(s) {
    fmt.Println(i, x)
  }

  func Backward[E any](s []E) func(func(int, E) bool) {
    return func(yield func(int, E) bool) {
        for i := len(s)-1; i >= 0; i-- {
            if !yield(i, s[i]) {
                return
            }
        }
    }
  }

I don't think anyone expects this to work in Go as it is today, it's just a new feature that will make the language more complex, but it will make certain kinds of programs simpler to write.

I should also note that the official name is "range-over-function iterators", I called it by a wrong name earlier.

[KingOfCoders]

Yes might depend on where you come from. As someone with decades of Java experience - not a fancy language over most of its lifecycle - I was mystified why there is no Iterator support as in Java for loops.

[simiones]

Oh, now I understand what you mean - you're thinking of this as a way to do `for (T x : collection)` in Java.

I see this as more like the `yield return` functions of C#, which I definitely wasn't expecting. That can of course also be used to implement an iterator for a collection, but it seems much more general.

Given that before generics Go had exactly 3 types of collections, and that those were all iterable with range, I guess I never thought about this thing missing from the for loop.

[EE84M3i]

An idomatic way to do this now is to start a goroutine and range over a channel it writes to. Less ergonomic and more error prone, but it works.

[pjmlp]

The thing with Typescript is that it is only a fancy JavaScript linter, so the only way to justify newer releases is to keep adding up the type system, there is nothing else when language features that aren't type system related are supposed to come from JavaScript evolution.

So they either say they are done, or keep adding type theory stuff until it implodes, I fear.

Actually I am looking forward to type annotations in JavaScript now in the roadmap, being good enough for general use cases.

[WA]

Is there a more simple JS linter that does 90% of what basic TypeScript does? I mostly use simple types (basic times, Promises, arrays, and a bunch of interfaces) and I find TypeScript valuable for that. It saved me a few times from accidentally treating a Promise<Whatever> as Whatever for example – and other things.

But I heard an interesting argument: It's not TypeScript vs. vanilla JS; it is TypeScript vs. whatever else full-blown linting/IDE comfort you can get by still writing vanilla JS with no transpile step.

[pjmlp]

I guess the recent movement started by some projects to go back to JSDoc type annotations kind of answers that.

[norman784]

Do you know if the Javascript type annotations is progressing? I didn't hear anything after the initial proposal.

[frankjr]

They held a meeting a few months ago so it's alive but probably still years away.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations/issues/184

[miningape]

I don't have the source at hand but I remember seeing that they wouldn't support it until it had progressed as a JavaScript proposal. Their reasoning was that the decorations API is really weak, and it will likely be changed meaning a complete rewrite of the TypeScript decorator implementations.

[ken47]

Yes, but TS users can stay on the "type-newbie" path, which is still a huge improvement over vanilla JS and doesn't take much effort. What I've had issues with is devs who came from the vanilla JS world and love it, so they go out of their way to avoid utilizing more complex types when they would add no-cost safety (aside from the initial minutes or hour spent learning the feature).

[Cthulhu_]

And that's dangerous; give people a lot of advanced options and they will inadvertedly use them, and nobody will dare to touch it, and it'll cause a lot of headaches, etc etc etc. Scala made this mistake as well. Go is the antithesis to TS and Scala, and I hope they keep it up.

I also hope but doubt that they will do something few other languages dare: remove features.

[ken47]

Go certainly has a very different philosophy, but I don't think it's necessarily superior. Typescript is not as academic as Scala, but it gives power to developers who are willing to put in the effort to learn. With that power comes greater efficiencies and type safety.

[jhanschoo]

> TS gets more and more complicated with each release, catering to the power users.

My understanding about the use of advanced/more expressive TR features is that it's OK if you don't use them, and don't bother wasting time for most products. Bot if you are writing a library of framework in TS, go ahead especially since they are meant to improve the experience of consumers.

[crowdyriver]

every feature that makes a language more complicated will eventually hit you. It might make the typescript compiler slower, harder to refactor, your lsp might also get slower, etc...

[KingOfCoders]

One person on the team will use them, if you don't put up a linter that prevents usage.

[falsandtru]

They just keep adding new features for fear of losing their position because they can't decorate the release notes. MS doesn't give high marks for bug fixes. Thus the bugs keep growing.

[cookiengineer]

I feel very similar to your experience.

What made me stay in go is its amazingly unified build toolchain. The things you can do with go:embed and go:generate blow my mind in every other project.

The golang.org/x package is also another thing, where there is pretty much every internet RFC related implementation available, ready to use.

[avtolik]

Can you give some examples how are you using go:embed and go:generate?

[maccard]

We use go:generate to generate services and types from protobufs.

    //go:generate protoc --go_out=src/generated/ protos/service.proto

Our CI pipeline is a dockerfile that looks vaguely like this:

    FROM golang:1.21 as build
    go generate
    go build
    go test

    FROM scratch
    COPY --from=build ...

The CI steps are: docker build <XXXX> && docker push <XXXX>

We have a goland project template that has options for generate, build, test that matches what we do in CI rather than having that _one_ edge case that is the difference between `make build` and `go build`. That difference has caused more than one outage in my career.

[bheadmaster]

One example that comes to mind is building a single-binary full-stack application.

You can use whatever frontend framework you want, and just embed the html/css/js/asset files inside the binary with go:embed. In case of dynamic set of files, you can also write a Go utility to generate the embeddings with go:generate.

In addition to the ease of distribution (no more assets/ directory - just a single binary executable!), it also increases speed of the application, as it no longer has to perform file system reads in order to serve a webpage.

[jadayesnaamsi]

A good example of a Go project using embed to pack its html/css/js assets in a single binary is PocketBase:

https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/ui/embe...

[heywire]

Last I checked, AdGuard Home also did this.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome

[Cthulhu_]

I've used go:generate to generate a set of structs based on an XSLT document. That said, since XML is fairly uncommon these days in popularity, the generator was a bit buggy still.

And I've used go:embed to include .sql files for database migrations and querying. I should really spend some time on this POC I made (sqlite, goose for migrations, and an implementation of temporal tables) and publish it as a demo.

[gotbeans]

Not OP, used embedded to add ebpf code compiled for a project, helps to only ship the binary. Same thing for shipping swagger static html stuff to host an OpenAPI server.

[hambos22]

> can't wait for some map/filter/find slice functions though

Till that day comes, you could use the "lo" library (inspired from lodash). It's my goto Swiss army knife for golang projects.

https://github.com/samber/lo

[puika]

On the other hand, I advise you NOT to use this kind of library and write simple, fast go code most of the time, with the occasional generics helper. Why the hell would I clutter my code with, for example: https://github.com/samber/lo?tab=readme-ov-file#fromentries-...

[shirogane86x]

I've had many cases in the past (not in go) where I've had to make use of that exact same function (in typescript, in F#, and in C#). it is actually quite useful when doing any amount of data manipulation (map/filter/reduce chain that often ends up into a list of key-value pairs, which then get turned into a map/dictionary of sorts).

At least in my job(s over the years), turning a flat list of db records into a more complex, nested (potentially on multiple levels) data structure before handing it off to the front-end is a very common. I've seen it done with "simple, fast code" (although not in go specifically, but in other languages), but it very quickly turned into huge messes of of long nested for loops and was very difficult to read. LINQ, Lodash, java's streams... I sincerely can't understand how go developers live without them. They make me a lot more productive both at reading and writing the code.

[Zach_the_Lizard]

Part of the issue is that Go has a variety of design choices / limitations that conspire to produce different design patterns in this area than what you might see with e.g. Java.

For example: let's say we want to implement something akin to Java's Comparator interface.

Java allows interfaces to be extended with default implementations. It also allows methods to specify their own generics separate from the entire interface / class.

Thus the "comparing()" method can take in a Function<T, U> that extracts a value of type U from T that is used for comparison purposes. The return type is Comparator<T>.

(Generics simplified a bit, there are other overloads, etc.)

There's also thenComparing(), which allows chaining Comparator instances and / or chaining Function<T, U>.

As a consequence, one can use .thenComparing() to build up a Comparator from the fields on a class pretty quickly. Especially with lambda syntax.

Go doesn't support methods having different type parameters than the overall interface / struct.

Go also doesn't have default implementations. It doesn't allow function or method overloading.

Go does have first class functions, however.

To build the equivalent capability, you'd most likely build everything around a comparison function (func[T any](a, b T) int) and write a bunch of functions to glue them together / handle useful operations.

That impacts the readability of a long chain of calls, especially since Go doesn't have a lambda syntax to make things a bit tighter.

Getting rid of the limitation on method-level generics would make this _significantly_ more ergonomic.

[gwd]

You wouldn't write that exact function. You'd have some complicated pipeline that ended up in a map; and it might be easier to follow the logic using map / filter / fromentries.

[Zach_the_Lizard]

I strongly agree. Map / filter isn't included, but a fair number of the various utilities are included in the standard library in the `slices` and `maps` packages.

`context` also helps solve a bunch of the channel related use cases in a more elegant (IMO) way.

There are only a handful of things in that package I wish were included, such as "Keys()" on a map.

[mohamedattahri]

FYI - “Keys()”, “Values()” and others have been pulled because they’re likely to be implemented using the new range-over-function paradigm.

They were included in the experimental packages on google.com/x.

[mplanchard]

Unrelated, but this link puts me into an infinite refresh loop on two mobile browsers on iOS (Firefox and DDG)

[c2xlZXB5Cg1]

Klingonization of go code. I don't like it.

[Cthulhu_]

Only if you're willing to take the cost associated with that; it adds a "DSL", an extra language to the language, reducing its goal of simple and readable code. Compare also with using a testing library that adds human-readable assertion phrases (expect(x).toBe(y) etc).

[stpedgwdgfhgdd]

Why not use the generic-based built-in slices?

https://pkg.go.dev/slices

[ryloric]

Yeah, it's quite productive in a counter intuitive way, not having a ton of features just removes a lot of tiny decisions you have to make in a richer language.

[lnxg33k1]

I’ve worked for a while at a client using typescript, after a while I started calling it “Tricks Driven Development”, every time I had to do something I’d read the docs, but then someone would communicate some trick not on the docs that was possible to use

[leonheld]

Go is beautiful, productive, readable. I love Go. It's my "C with niceties".

[deergomoo]

I feel the same way. I was recently evaluating TypeScript and Go for a small project at work, having little experience with either. I went with Go almost entirely because I’d made decent progress in solving the problem by the end of my timeboxed investigation period. After a similar time with TypeScript, all I’d really done was get bogged down trying to work out what tooling I should be using.

Compilation, testing, and automatically formatting TypeScript all have multitudes of options with their own pros and cons. All that stuff is just built into the Go toolchain. Yeah it’s not always perfect but it’s more than good enough and, importantly, it’s ubiquitous. There’s nothing to think about or argue over.

That said, I’ve been wanting to try Deno. My understanding is that it takes a much more Go-like approach to running TypeScript.

[fennecbutt]

Yeah someone I know has been banging on about go, too. I have a personal project I want to do so maybe I'll pick go for it.

The main pro and con to the JS ecosystem is the fact that it's so flexible; you can mostly do things how you want and there are so many libraries in each space all competing. But because you can do anything how you like it becomes hard to decide which library you want to use (or a diff one every project) and every dev has a different way of accomplishing the same thing.

I used to write internal libraries and frameworks a lot in my career and one of my mantras was to use TS to try to lock devs into doing things a certain way but there only so far you can go.

My main worry with Go is like, is everything built in? Are there multiple say, Web server libs like with nodejs or only a single option? How are deficiencies addressed if there are fewer options and fewer ways og doing things?

[Touche]

Go is the language for getting sh*t done.

[WuxiFingerHold]

Best summary of Go. That should be the headline of the Go website.

[WuxiFingerHold]

Interesting ...

>> The amount of time spent on things such as linting, selecting the correct library for server routing, the correct server, coding standards,

I don't fully agree here. Those points are pretty straight forward and coding standards (not formatting, for TS prettier is pretty standard, btw.) need to be defined even in Go projects. Also, Deno has much of the setting up solved.

>> basic error-handling and enforcing it with a custom error or Result type to get out of this nested try/catch hell which still loses the majority of errors.

Fully agreed. Maybe I have a big lack of understanding of error handling in NodeJS, but how on earth do I find out what functions can throw errors and what are the errors thrown? If someone could enlighten me I'd be really grateful. To be on the safe side I would need to run my whole code in a try..catch block. How to decide how to handle different errors if I don't know which errors can occur? On the other hand, just yesterday I had to debug a Rust panic in a smallish code base. Even with stacktraces turned on it took half an hour to find out where there error occurred. Still, Go and Rusts error handling is much better. IIRC, in Java you see all types of exceptions that can occur in the docs of a function?

>> Setting up testing and mocking. Setting up Prisma

Again, not a big thing IMO. If you like an ORM, Prisma is one of the best.

>> Don't get me wrong, I really do like Typescript.

Yeah, that's the thing. Typescript is such a fantastic language. Writing Go feels like using a hand-axe. Typescript's null handling alone makes it 10 times better (I hope everyone is using it, but that underlines your point regarding the conventions needed ...). I recently found a lib that gives us compile time checked pattern matching like in Rust.

[endtime]

I got to spend a couple years writing Dart (not Flutter) and found it to be the best of both worlds. Such an underappreciated language.

[tonis2]

Yeah, Dart is way better / easier to debug, than Typescript in my opinion

[WuxiFingerHold]

Interesting, Dart for backend? Do you build APIs? How is the ecosystem? I heard good thing of Swift as well, but I have concerns that it's to niche for backend stuff.

[endtime]

I was working on Google Assistant at the time; the dialogue manager was written in Dart. I was mostly writing libraries and platform code...so APIs in a sense.

The ecosystem isn't huge outside of Flutter, of course.

[baby]

The problem of typescript is the lack of convention and the emphasis on configuration, the reverse made Golang a great language.

[stokedmind]

Other replies miss the point - the problem doesn't lie with Typescript itself exactly. Setting up a nodejs/js project with all of the fixings (linting, Typescript, spell checks, builds if needed, etc) is quite tedious.

Sure you can accept some template project or CLI tool to kickstart things if just starting out, but at some point you will need to tweak the configuration and there is an enormous realm of options.

I'm surprised no one mentioned this already, but a runtime like Deno goes to great lengths to solve alot of these pain points. You get testing, linting, bundling, and Typescript out-of-the-box with sane settings. If Deno worked better with GRPC I'd probably be using it right now in my work projects!

[38]

> can't wait for some map/filter/find slice functions though!

just use a for loop. 90% of the time the code will actually be clearer, and faster.

the hoops people just through to avoid 2 extra lines of code is mind boggling.

[shepherdjerred]

Deno fixes most of the issues you're describing.

[__loam]

I love go. It's just so simple.