[9rx]

> and are more directly comparable than e.g. Go and Ruby

Why do you say that? The original Go announcement made it abundantly clear that it was intended to be like a dynamically-typed language, but faster. It is probably more like Python than Ruby, as it clearly took a lot of ideas from Python, but most seem to consider those languages to be in the same hemisphere anyway.

Beyond maybe producing complied binaries, which is really just an implementation detail, not a hard feature of the language, what is really comparable with Rust?

[cyphar]

Go was sold as a "systems language" for a long time, and a lot of people deciding on what language to use in the 2010s made decisions based on that bit of advertising. Rust filled the same niche at around the same time so it's not really surprising people would mentally connect the two.

FWIW, I suspect the entire container ecosystem would not have gone with Go if it wasn't for Docker picking Go mostly based on the "systems language" label. (If only they knew how painful it would be...)

To be clear, I use both and like them for different reasons. But in my experience I agree that Go and Rust are far closer brethren than Go and Python. A lot of the design nexus in Go was to take C and try to improve it with a handful of pared down ideas from Java -- this leads to a similar path as the C++-oriented design nexus for Rust. Early Rust even had green threads like Go. They are obviously very different languages in other respects but it's not particularly suprising that people would compare them given their history.

Your later comments about lots of Go users coming from Python is not particularly surprising and I don't think actually helps your point -- they wanted to improve performance so they switched to a compiled language that handles multithreading well. I would argue they moved to Go precisely because it isn't like Python. If Go didn't exist they would've picked a different language (probably Rust, C++, or any number of languages in the same niche). Maybe if there was a "Python-but-fast" language that they all switched to you would have a point, but Go is not that language.

[9rx]

> Go was sold as a "systems language" for a long time

Still is, but it was also made abundantly clear at the time that those systems were things like network servers specifically. It was even later noted that the team was somewhat surprised that people found uses elsewhere. I do recognize this confused the Rust crowd, who bizarrely think that sum types are known as enums, and think that systems are programs that run on raw hardware (think kernels, embedded software, etc.). But nobody else randomly redefines every word they come across.

In the standard nomenclature, systems are the "opposite" of scripts. Scripts being programs that carry out a single task and then exit upon completion, as opposed to a long-running program that continually carries out (possibly a variety of) tasks. If Go isn't a systems programming language then we can conclude that it is a scripting language. But I've never heard of anyone calling it a scripting language... As far as I can tell, the world generally agrees that Go is a systems language.

And yes, this is where I would agree that Rust and Go are more similar, both being geared towards building systems (although not necessary the same type of systems). Python and Ruby are decidedly geared more towards scripting tasks. But, of course, that doesn't mean you can't build scripts in Go and Rust and systems in Python and Ruby. People were definitely trying to write systems in Python in Ruby.

> I suspect the entire container ecosystem would not have gone with Go if it wasn't for Docker picking Go mostly based on the "systems language" label.

Makes sense. The container ecosystem (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) was originally built as (and for) network servers — the exact niche Go was designed for. I think you make a good point that they've grown to be so much more, to the point that the network bits are hardly even relevant, but if we could erase these tools and the term "systems language" from memory and start over to solve primarily for the pain points associated with running network servers again, I'm not sure you've made a good case that they wouldn't still land on Go. I get why you say that in hindsight, but these projects didn't have hindsight when they were being first created.

> A lot of the design nexus in Go was to take C and try to improve it with a handful of pared down ideas from Java

That runs counter to the claims of the Go team, who explicitly stated that their goal was to make a fast 'dynamically-typed' language. Obviously they introduced a type system so that the compiler could optimize on known primitive types, so it is not truly dynamically-typed, but it is also obvious that the type system doesn't extend beyond what is necessary for the sake of performance and what was necessary to maintain a dynamically-typed 'feel' around that, much to the chagrin of type theorists.

You are quite right that it does share a lot of commonality with C — they were conceived by the same guy, after all! But, given the goal of being "faster" that makes sense. Modern CPUs are literally designed for C. I'm not sure where Java fits. Limbo I can see. Is that what you meant? Java and Limbo were both created at the same time. Perhaps you've somehow managed to conflate them because of that? A lot of people do suggest that Go and Rust are oft considered similar simply because they were created around the same time.

The Java team did warn the Go team to not to screw up implementing generics like they did. Maybe that's where you got Java in your mind? But the warning was heeded. The generics design Go got is quite different. Or maybe you are thinking of Kubernetes originally being written in Java and being criticized for carrying many of those Java-isms into the Go rewrite?

> they wanted to improve performance so they switched to a compiled language that handles multithreading well.

...while, most importantly, sticking to something that was familiar. Perhaps you have already forgotten, but they also evaluated Rust at the time. "It is too hard to learn", they concluded. A bit overdramatic, sure, but when you read between the lines there was a valid point in there — that Rust wasn't like the tools that were commonly used before it.

Go was. The only somewhat unique thing it brought to the table was goroutines, but even that was simply taking what people were already doing with libraries in Ruby and Python (Twisted, EventMachine, etc.) and formalizing it as part of the language. It wasn't a different way of thinking, just syntax sugar.

And this is why I ultimately conclude that Go is more like Python and Ruby than it is Rust. More so Python, granted. Ruby's message passing model leads to some different conventions. Put the code for a Python program and a Go program side by side, squint slightly, and you aren't apt to be able to even see a difference. Especially if that Python program actually sticks to the Zen of Python. Put a Python program beside a Rust program and they are going to be completely different animals.

So, the original comparison was Go and Ruby, not Go and Python. As mentioned, Go is less like Ruby than it is like Python. To establish Go is more like Ruby we are operating on the premise that Python is more like Ruby than it is Rust, which I posited was the prevailing view. But maybe you disagree and that is where the contention lies? If that’s the case, why do you see Python as being more like Rust than Ruby?

[cyphar]

> I do recognize this confused the Rust crowd, who bizarrely think that sum types are known as enums, and think that systems are programs that run on raw hardware (think kernels, embedded software, etc.). But nobody else randomly redefines every word they come across.

I was not a Rust developer in 2013 and I still had the same impression. I think that most C developers (which is what I was primarily at the time) would interpret "systems language" to mean "loosely equivalent to C or C++" in that you have a lot of low-level control over what your program does (which usually means you can write operating systems with it, though I don't think that's necessarily a requirement). Go does not fit that bill.

To be honest, I've always felt the Go folks redefined the word and not the other way around. Are web servers very important? Of course, but a programming language intended primarily for performant web servers is not a "systems language". Maybe this usage of the term is a Google-ism that escaped containment. You can probably find comments from me throughout the 2010s bemoaning this (mis)use of the word.

Funnily enough, Russ Cox himself said in 2014 that he "slightly regrets" calling Go a systems programming language because it leads to confusion[1]. There was another panel talk from a long time ago (sadly, I can't find a video of the talk at the moment) where another Go language developer said that a systems programming language is a language that has pointers and allows typecasting of pointers (more specifically, one where you can create a memory allocator) which always seemed like a very low bar to me.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ZQR32nTVF_4?t=408

> Makes sense. The container ecosystem (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.) was originally built as (and for) network servers — the exact niche Go was designed for.

I don't think that's at all accurate. Docker originally needed to do a heck of a lot of core system operations, which it turns out are very annoying to do in Go (I maintain runc, which inherited most of this code -- it's really not fun). Yes, Docker has a HTTP API, but I don't think of it is as being primarily a network server. And whether the process you run is a web server is not incredibly relevant -- most of the heavy lifting for containers is done by the kernel once you've set everything up.

(Of course the first versions of Docker just used LXC so it was slightly less painful but once they started developing libcontainer -- which is around the time I started working on Docker -- the real pain-points with Go started emerging.)

> The Java team did warn the Go team to not to screw up implementing generics like they did. Maybe that's where you got Java in your mind? But the warning was heeded. The generics design Go got is quite different. Or maybe you are thinking of Kubernetes originally being written in Java and being criticized for carrying many of those Java-isms into the Go rewrite?

This is from more than a decade ago now, but I remember that the Russ Cox in particular had a talk about Go's interfaces and my impression of the talk was that he made several references to Java and that they were trying to find a better model than Java's inheritance system while still solving the same problems. Maybe I'm overstating the impact it had (and maybe it was more a case of talk being tailored to a particular audience) but my impression was that interfaces were an attempt to solve something that Java folks wanted but without all of the issues the Java design has. Generics came much later and I think that everyone was unhappy with the result (though thankfully they have slowly become more erognomic, even if in my experience they are still only really useful for utility functions).

I never got the impression that Python was an explicit source of design ideas for Go. Yes, they were all Google people and so all of them were very familiar with Python use in production, but I just don't see it. Maybe you could argue the "batteries included" thing is Python-esque but that's about it.

Also Borg (Google's internal predecessor to Kubernetes) was written in C++[2], not Java. Kubernetes was also always written in Go (again, because Go had become the "container language" due to Docker).

[2]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2741948.2741964 "All components of Borg are written in C++."

>Perhaps you have already forgotten, but they also evaluated Rust at the time. "It is too hard to learn", they concluded.

Who is "they"? For the Docker example, my memory is that they later said they looked at Rust at the time but it wasn't 1.0 yet in 2012 and so it was a moot point. I think the only other language they seriously considered was C++ and they decided Go would be easier.

> And this is why I ultimately conclude that Go is more like Python and Ruby than it is Rust. More so Python, granted. Ruby's message passing model leads to some different conventions. Put the code for a Python program and a Go program side by side, squint slightly, and you aren't apt to be able to even see a difference. Especially if that Python program actually sticks to the Zen of Python. Put a Python program beside a Rust program and they are going to be completely different animals.

Well, I agree that Go is more like Python than Rust is like Python (though Rust has better support for some of the functional things in Python than Go and there are small things like format strings that are also very similar, but on the whole I would generally agree). But that is an entirely separate question as to why Go and Rust are often compared to one another. In my experience the comparison is not focused on surface-level syntax but is instead about what purpose it serves (this is like the difference between comparing bats, birds, and flying fish to comparing barnacles and shrimp).

That being said, the fact that it is basically impossible to stop the GC from closing the underlying file descriptor of an *os.File (necessitating dup(2) when you're working with libraries that don't like that) is very Python-esque (no, runtime.SetFinalizer doesn't work). You would be surprised with how many times I've run in this issue...

[9rx]

> I think that most C developers (which is what I was primarily at the time) would interpret "systems language" to mean "loosely equivalent to C or C++"

And that would be a fair interpretation. Before Go, Rust, and the like arrived on the scene C and C++ were about the only languages you'd use to write said long-running programs. You could maybe also throw Java in there, but safe to say it was a pretty short list. Most everyone else was focused on scripting workloads there for the longest time. I might even suggest that Go was the very language that broke us out of that loop, ushering in the new era of systems languages.

> Funnily enough, Russ Cox himself said in 2014 that he "slightly regrets" calling Go a systems programming language because it leads to confusion[1].

Stands to reason. Nobody wants to introduce confusion (maybe Pike, who is a language purist). Alternative interpretations obviously exist. Still, it's not clear what else to call it unless we want to settle on Go being a scripting language. But I don't think either of us consider Go as being a scripting language, do we?

> I don't think of it is as being primarily a network server.

In hindsight, as was said. But we're talking about day one. No project has the full vision at the onset. Software is built up, piece by piece, with next steps determined as you go. There may have been some glimmer of understanding of needing to interface with the system at a low level that Go is not well suited for, but "oooh shiny networking abilities"...

> but is instead about what purpose it serves

Well, we know for certain that the only intended purpose for Go was network services. Obviously people have found other uses for it in the wild, but it was always made clear that it was built for a purpose. So, which languages do you think are more in line with building network services? Those that became famous because of Django and Rails, or those that became famous for Torvalds not wanting it in the Linux kernel?

[cyphar]

> Before Go, Rust, and the like arrived on the scene

I'm glad you now agree that Go and Rust have enough similarities to be grouped together in this discussion. ;)

> There may have been some glimmer of understanding of needing to interface with the system at a low level that Go is not well suited for, but "oooh shiny networking abilities"...

I mean, that's just not how Docker was developed at all. I was there (okay, maybe not at the very start but I was involved in the project when it was still very young).

The honest answer is that they didn't foresee how annoying it would be to deal with those things in Go, not that they didn't expect to have to do those things. For one thing, their internal version of Docker at dotCloud was written in Python and so they had a good idea of the kinds of things they will need to do in the rewrite. Lots of lessons were learned over the past decade, you can't just retroactively apply modern maxims like that (i.e., "well, obviously we now know that Go isn't good at X so when they started using it obviously they didn't really plan to use it for X" isn't particularly convincing, especially to people who actually lived through it).

(But none of this is particularly relevant to the original point IMHO.)

[9rx]

> I'm glad you now agree that Go and Rust have enough similarities to be grouped together in this discussion. ;)

I'm glad you finally got around to reading the thread. ;) They've been grouped on the same spectrum since the beginning. For example, "Go is most similar to Go, but on the spectrum is way closer to Python and Ruby than it is Rust."

> The honest answer is that they didn't foresee how annoying it would be to deal with those things in Go

I'm sure it was underestimated — developers tend to be optimistic — but certainly when the creators are explicitly telling you that it is a 'dynamically-typed' language intended for writing network services you're going to understand that you're in for a least a bit of a bumpy ride if you try use it for something that would traditionally have been written in C. No need to look back retroactively. Go was originally announced that way.

Regardless, what is curious, though, is that it wasn't recognized as annoying very quickly at the onset. This does suggest, like before, that work began in the places Go excels and once the other stuff came 'round the sunk costs starting sinking in. You were there, so feel free to tell us the whole story, but you'd think the ship would have been abandoned pretty quickly if the "hard parts" were where things started. It is not like the team didn't already give up on another language.

> (But none of this is particularly relevant to the original point IMHO.)

Or is it? I mean, if Go were just like Rust then wouldn't you say those annoying aspects of Docker wouldn't be annoying anymore? That was my read from earlier. But since Go is more like Python and Ruby...

[wavemode]

I don't think this is correct. Go is a language with structs, arrays, value semantics and pointers, and an `unsafe` package for performing low-level operations on those pointers and deal directly with the layout of memory. And in practice Go and Rust have found use in a lot of the exact same systems programming and network programming domains, as replacement languages for C.

Go is certainly a higher-level language than C, but to say it's at all similar to Python or Ruby is nonsensical.

[9rx]

> Go is a language with structs, arrays

Just like Ruby. Just like pretty much every language people actually use.

> value semantics and pointers

Value semantics are one of the tricks it uses to satisfy the "but faster" part. It is decidedly its own language. But it only supports value semantics, so this is more like Ruby, which only supports reference semantics. Rust supports both value and reference semantics, so it is clearly a very different beast.

> and an `unsafe` package for performing low-level operations on those pointers

The Ruby standard library also includes a package for this.

> And in practice Go and Rust have found use in a lot of the exact same systems programming and network programming domains, as replacement languages for C.

Maybe in some cases, but the data is abundantly clear that Go was most adopted by those who were previously using Ruby and Python. The Go team did think at one point that it might attract C++ programmers, but they quickly found out that wasn't the case. It was never widely adopted in that arena. Whereas I think it is safe to say that many C++ programmers would consider Rust. Which makes sense as Rust is intended to play in the same ballpark as C++. Go was explicitly intended to be a 'faster Python'.

> but to say it's at all similar to Python or Ruby is nonsensical.

Go is most similar to Go, but on the spectrum is way closer to Python and Ruby than it is Rust. It bears almost no resemblance to Rust. Hell, even the "Rustacians'" complaint about Go is that it is nothing like Rust.

[pjmlp]

What?

Here is Rob Pike blog post about instead of getting C and C++ developers, they got the dynamic language folks.

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

[9rx]

You hit the wrong reply button. It was the sibling comment that thought that Go attracted C developers.

[pjmlp]

Not at all.

[9rx]

Let me help you narrow in on the only bit where your comment can find relevance:

> And in practice Go and Rust have found use in a lot of the exact same systems programming and network programming domains, as replacement languages for C.

To which was already followed up with:

> the data is abundantly clear that Go was most adopted by those who were previously using Ruby and Python.

Nice of you to say the exact same thing again, I guess, but it would be more effective if it were correctly positioned in the thread. I know, it can be difficult to track down the right correct reply button. Especially when in a rush to post something that just repeats what is already there.