| > 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? |
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...