[9rx]

On the flip side, what would be the point? There are already a million other languages that have everything and the kitchen sink.

Not going down the same road is the only reason it didn't end up on the pile of obscure languages nobody uses.

[pjmlp]

The only reason it didn't end on pile of obscure languages nobody uses, it called Google, followed by luck with Docker and Kubernetes adoption on the market, after they decided to rewrite from Python and Java respectively into Go, after Go heads joined their teams.

Case in point, Limbo and Oberon-2, the languages that influenced its design, and authors were involved with.

[tsimionescu]

I don't think that's the (only) reason Go became popular. The huge thing about Go is the runtime: it's the only language runtime available today, at least in any language with a large org behind it, that offers (a) GC, (b) fast start-up time, (c) static types, (d) fast execution, and (e) multi-threading.

This is a killer combination for any team looking to write code for auto-scalable microservices, to run for example on Kubernetes. Java is not great in this niche because of its slow startup time, relatively large memory overhead, and the need for warm-up before code actually starts executing fast (so scaling up and down has a very large cost for Java services). .NET has similar problems, and also a huge container size. Python is far too slow, and not typed. TypeScript is single threaded, and still has a pretty hefty runtime. OCaml doesn't have any large org behind it, is quite obscure syntax, and was still single-threaded at the time Kubernetes started. Haskell has similar issues, and is also large and slow starting. Rust, C++, C all require manual memory management.

So, it's no surprise that Go was used for Kubernetes services themselves, and it's no surprise that people designing for Kubernetes mostly chose to write their new stuff in Go. Go the language, with its antiquated design, is actually quite secondary to all of that. But Go's runtime is completely unmatched in this space.

[dev_l1x_be]

F# does that too.

> .NET has similar problems

s/has/had/

https://blog.washi.dev/posts/tinysharp/

The issue is that some people still fighting against the concepts ML family languages (primarily SML) introduced. Go implemented go routines and channels from CSP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...) but dragged a lot on influence from C (understandable) into the language.

I think Rust opted for the best combinations (some CSP, a lot of ML and a bit of C++).

[9rx]

> The issue is that some people still fighting against the concepts ML family languages

To be fair, everyone was fighting against ML concepts at the time. Ruby on Rails was "in" and "doing situps" was "out". Go was built for the time it was created. It was, quite explicitly as told at its launch announcement, made to be a "dynamically typed" language with static type performance. It is unlikely it would have had a static type system at all if they knew how to achieve the same performance optimizations without a type system.

> I think Rust opted for the best combinations

But built in another time. Ruby on Rails was "out" and static typing (ML style in particular) was "in" by the time Rust finally got around to showing up to the party. Looking back, it may not seem like there was much time between the creation of Go and the creation of Rust, but on the tech scale it was created eons later. The fashion of tech can change on a dime — as captured in the humorous fable about JS having a new "must-use" framework every week.

The fashion trends will change again at some point. They always do.

[tsimionescu]

Not sure what you mean about F# - being a CLR language, it has the same runtime issues as C# (and IronPython, managed C++, etc).

The article you quote is a toy example - if you write a C# or F# web API server, you'll see that it takes up way more space than a Go one with similar functionality (and has way higher memory overhead as well). A Go API web server is maybe 10MB on disk, with no dependencies (that is, you can run it perfectly in a container that is defined as `FROM scratch; COPY my-go-exec /my-go-exec `). The equivalent Java or .NET container is somewhere around 2-400MB at the minimum.

As for the syntax and constructs, I don't care so much. If OCaml or SML had comparable support and a comparable ecosystem to Go, I'd bet plenty of people would have chosen them instead.

[atombender]

OP's point is about why Go took off, which happened more than a decade ago.

Native AOT compilation didn't exist for .NET then, and .NET was, for all intents and purposes, Windows-only.

(Last I checked, the AOT story for C# is not that great even today. No idea about F#.)

[qcnguy]

Kubernetes services are one of the places where you don't care about startup time. Likewise for Docker itself. These are the things that do the scaling, normally.

Go is not particularly fast. People often see that Java gets faster as it runs and thinks, oh, it must be slow at the start then. But when you compare like with like, Go ends up being stuck at the bottom of the curve that Java then sharply climbs. The difference in GC quality is big, or at least, used to be? The only place where you really notice the difference is command line tools, and Java has GraalVM for that.

[tsimionescu]

> Kubernetes services are one of the places where you don't care about startup time.

There are some kubernetes services that scale up and down. And even for those that don't normally, if they have some kind of failure, the difference between taking a millisecond to get back up and taking a second can actually matter for a web host.

> Go is not particularly fast. People often see that Java gets faster as it runs and thinks, oh, it must be slow at the start then. But when you compare like with like, Go ends up being stuck at the bottom of the curve that Java then sharply climbs.

Go starts up much faster than Java. And Go code runs measurably faster than interpreted Java code, even though it's slower than the JITed code you'll eventually have if your JVM runs long enpigh. But un-JITed Java code is very slow, more comparable to Python than JITed Java or with Go . This has nothing to do with the GC - where I do agree Go is mediocre at best.

[zozbot234]

I wouldn't call the Go GC mediocre, it's one of the few fully concurrent GC's in common use. It probably has significantly lower memory demand than Java/NET for comparable workloads.

[tsimionescu]

Go's GC is not compacting, it has significant mutator overhead on every pointer write, it has an expensive allocator (it has to search through free lists, since it can't compact), and the free pahse has to do work proportional to the amount of garbage the program produces. It also produces no debugging information for ownership, for some bizarre reason (you can't tell from a Go heap dump with any standard Go tool which object is keeping another object around).

The fact that it can do this mostly concurrently (it's not fully concurrent, actually) is not that special - Java's latest GC is also mostly concurrent, without having any of the other previous drawbacks.

Go's big advantage in terms of memory management is that it doesn't produce as much garbage as most GC languages. The fact that it natively supports value types, and actually uses them extensively in the standard library (unlike C#, which also supports these), and it's excellent stack escape analysis which allows many allocations to stay on the stack and outside the GC heap entirely, is what makes Go have such little memory overhead.

[pebal]

This isn't fully concurrent GC. It pauses mutators threads and delegates them to perform some of the work for the GC.

[atombender]

When using HPAs to quickly ramp replica sets up and down based on load, startup time is absolutely an important factor. You want services to start within hundreds of milliseconds at most.

[Animats]

The strength of Go is not the language. It's that the libraries you need for web back-end stuff are written, maintained, and used in production by Google. All the obscure cases get exercised in production due to sheer volume of internal usage.

At one time, Go maps were not thread-safe. Was that fixed?

[Yoric]

I'd be surprised if the JSON module was used within Google, though. It's neither particularly fast nor particularly convenient nor particularly suited to properly handle edge cases. But it's still in the stdlib for compatibility reasons.

[9rx]

> At one time, Go maps were not thread-safe. Was that fixed?

sync.Map was added, but isn't intended to be a general purpose map.

——

The Map type is specialized. Most code should use a plain Go map instead, with separate locking or coordination, for better type safety and to make it easier to maintain other invariants along with the map content.

The Map type is optimized for two common use cases: (1) when the entry for a given key is only ever written once but read many times, as in caches that only grow, or (2) when multiple goroutines read, write, and overwrite entries for disjoint sets of keys. In these two cases, use of a Map may significantly reduce lock contention compared to a Go map paired with a separate Mutex or RWMutex.

[pjmlp]

Exactly, by Google.

[9rx]

> The only reason it didn't end on pile of obscure languages nobody uses, it called Google

Dart ended up on the pile of languages nobody uses. And Carbon? What's Carbon? Exactly!

> Case in point, Limbo and Oberon-2, the languages that influenced its design

Agreed. Limbo and Oberon-2, as primitive as they may look now, had the kitchen sinks of their time. Why wouldn't they have ended up on the pile of languages nobody uses?

[pjmlp]

People love to bring those as counter examples, without actually knowing a single fact about them.

Dart was a victim of internal politics between the Chrome team, Dart team, AdWords moving away from GWT wanting AngularDart (see Angular documentary), and the Web in general.

Had Chrome team kept pushing DartVM, it might have been quite different story.

Carbon, good example of failure to actually know what the team purposes are. It is officially a research project for Google themselves, where the team is the first to advise using Rust or another MSL.

One just needs to actually spend like a couple of minutes on their wiki, but I guess that is asking too much on modern times.

Limbo and Oberon-2 were definitely not kitchen sinks of their time, their failure was that neither Bell Labs in 1996, nor ETHZ in 1992, were that relevant for the programming language community in the industry.

[9rx]

> Had Chrome team kept pushing DartVM, it might have been quite different story.

Trouble with that line of thinking is that Google never pushed Go either. It didn't even bother to use it internally (outside from the occasional side project here and there). Google paid some salaries. I'll give you that. But it has paid salaries for a lot of different languages. That is not some kind of secret sauce.

> It is officially a research project for Google themselves

It's not just a research project. It is officially "not ready for use", but its roadmap has a clear "ready for use" plan in the coming months. Rust was also "not ready for use" when it hit the streets, it officially being a Mozilla research project, but every second discussion on HN was about it and what is to come. And that was without Google backing. If what you say is true, why isn't Carbon being shouted from every rooftop right now?

I know you're struggling to grasp at straws here, but let's just be honest for a moment: If it hasn't caught attention already, it isn't going to. Just another language to add to the pile.

[pjmlp]

I guess Kubernetes doesn't count as Google pushing it then.

It is officially "not ready to use", it isn't a strawman as people keep complaining about nothing.

[9rx]

Kubernetes is written in Go (-ish. More like written in Java using Go syntax, especially in its early days when you claim it did some kind of pushing). But what kind of push are you dreaming up that it offered? If anything, Kubernetes leaves you to question if you ever want to write software again. The idea that it made anyone, let alone legions of people required to make something a "success", think "This is great. I should write my program in Go too!" is laughable.

[stouset]

Having the weight of Google behind it is the primary reason it didn't end up on the pile of obscure languages nobody uses.

[9rx]

Oh...? Dart never gained much steam. And let's not forget about Carbon! Can you name even just one person who has tried Carbon? Have more than a handful of people even heard of Carbon?

I will grant you that Carbon is still in its infancy, but when Rust was in the same youthful stage we never heard an end to all the people playing with it. You, even if not tried it yourself, definitely knew about it.

You've made up a fun idea, but reality doesn't support it. Google has not shown its weight carries anything. They have really struggled to get any for-profit business units off the ground since they gained the weight, never mind their hobbies! If anything, Google is detrimental to a project.

[pjmlp]

Already explained in another thread, learn the politics of Dart, and Carbon is still on the drawing board.

[geodel]

So failures are some deep valid reasons whereas success is developers don't know any better language.

[pjmlp]

Many don't, otherwise they would not do stuff like using Python for performance workloads.

Lets also not forget Rob Pike famous quote regarding simple minds, as target audience.

As for Go, Kubernetes made it unavoidable, it is like UNIX for C, Web for JavaScript, and so forth.

[9rx]

> Many don't, otherwise they would not do stuff like using Python for performance workloads.

While you fairly point out that many fall into Python because they learned about it in school and never bother to look beyond, Go has had no such equivalent. For you to choose it, you have to actively seek it out, where you are going to also see all the other programming languages you could also choose.

> As for Go, Kubernetes made it unavoidable, it is like UNIX for C, Web for JavaScript, and so forth.

UNIX's programming interface is a set of C functions. You are right that C is the path of least resistance to use it.

The web's programming interface is Javascript. You are right that Javascript is the path of least resistance to use it.

Kubernetes' programming interface is a "REST API" – or your program running inside a container, if you want to look at it from the other direction. In what way is Go the path of least resistance to use it?

[9rx]

Already...? Said "explanation" was posted over an hour after the comment replied to here.

If only Google put their weight into a watch, maybe you'd have one?

Oh wait. They did! Google can't successfully turn their weight into much of anything. Go's success, if we can call it that, clearly happened in spite of Google.

[stouset]

Googlers aren’t expected to wear a Google-branded watch at work. They are expected to write go. Having an entire Google’s worth of programmers using your programming language isn’t exactly a minor influence.

[9rx]

> They are expected to write go.

Like who? Outside of Go itself, which is really more of a community project — albeit with the chief maintainers still on Google's payroll, almost nothing at Google is written in Go. In fact, Pike once gave a talk reflecting on why it didn't succeed in that space, and noted that it was the "Python and Ruby programmers" who actually ended up adopting it.

Google makes money selling services (i.e. Google Cloud) that run Kubernetes, Docker, etc. If it weren't for that, it is unlikely that Google would even be continuing to maintain it at this point. It was an interesting experiment, perhaps, but ultimately a failure within Google. As before, it was the Python and (probably most especially) Ruby communities that ended up leaning into it.

Which isn't surprising in hindsight. Go offered those who were using Python and Ruby a language that was in the same kind of vein, while solving many of the pain points they were experiencing with Python and Ruby (awful deployment strategies, terrible concurrency stories, trouble with performance, etc.) These developers were never going to use Haskell. They wanted Ruby with less problems.

And that's what Go gave them — at least to the extent of being better than any other attempt to do the same. Since it solved real problems people had, without forcing them into new programming paradigms, it was adopted. Choosing a technology based on starry-eyed fandom and arbitrary feelings might be how you go about navigating this world, but that doesn't extrapolate.

[geodel]

> They are expected to write go.

This got to be a joke right. The only thing I hear is at Google no one likes Go. Most software is in C++, Rust, Java or Kotlin.

[stouset]

Necessary and sufficient are two separate concepts.

[Yoric]

Well, that and the slight fact that it bears Google's brand name.

I personally appreciate Go as a research experiment. Plenty of very interesting ideas, just as, for instance, Haskell. I don't particularly like it as a development language, but I can understand why some people do.

[9rx]

> Plenty of very interesting ideas

Is there? When you get down to it, it is really just a faster Python. Which is exactly what it was said to be when it was released. Their goal was to create a "dynamically-typed" language that was more performant. It is likely that it wouldn't have had a static type system at all if they figured out how to achieve on the performance end without needing types.

You can tell who is clueless when you hear someone say its type system is lacking. I mean, technically it is, but it is supposed to be. Like saying Javascript or Ruby's type system is lacking.

[pjmlp]

Faster Python with a very small set of its capabilities.

[Yoric]

Two examples of interesting ideas:

- using zero values as an optimization mechanism;

- (non-)pointers and passing self by copy.

I mean, I hate both mechanisms, but intellectually, I find them quite interesting.

Also, I'd not classify it as a faster Python. It's more of a cousin of Obj-C if the authors of Obj-C had fallen in love of Erlang instead of Smalltalk.

[bombela]

Those ideas where already present in C/C++ decades prior. BSS program area. And passing struct by value vs pointer.