[jryio]

I've been saying this for maybe nine months vis-à-vis my consulting work keeps proving it.

Go is an excellent language for LLM code generation. There exists a large stable training corpus, one way to write it, one build system, one formatter, static typing, CSP concurrency that doesn't have C++ footguns.

The language hasn't had a breaking version in over a decade. There's minimal framework churn. When I advise teams to adopt agentic coding workflows at my consultancy [0], Go delivers highly consistent results via Claude and Codex regularly and more often than working with clients using TypeScript and/or Python.

When LLMs have to navigate Python and TypeScript there is a massive combinatorial space of frameworks, typing approaches, and utility libraries.

Too much optionality in the training distribution. The output is high entropy and doesn't converge. Python only dominated early AI coding because ML researchers write Python and trained on Python first. It was path dependence, not merit.\

The thing nobody wants to say is that the reason serious programmers historically hated Go is exactly why LLMs are great at it: There's a ceiling on abstraction.

Go has many many failings (e.g. it took over a decade to get generics). But LLMs don't care about expressiveness, they care about predictability. Go 1.26 just shipped a completely rewritten go fix built on the analysis framework that does AST-level refactoring automatically. That's huge for agentic coding because it keeps codebases modern without needing the latest language features in training data or wasting tokens looking up new signatures.

I spent four years building production public key infrastructure in Golang before LLMs [1]. After working coding agents like everyone else and domain-switching for clients - I've become more of a Go advocate because the language finally delivers on its promise. Engineers have a harder time complaining about the verbose and boilerplate syntax when an LLM does it correctly every single time.

[0]: https://sancho.studio

[1]: https://github.com/zoom/zoom-e2e-whitepaper

[gf000]

Most of these reasons apply to Java as much, if not more.

It's an even more popular language with even more training data and also has a better type system so more validation on LLM output, etc.

[hu3]

Java has decade(s) of cruft and breaking changes which LLMs were trained on. It's hard to compare. Plus Go compilation speed/test running provides quick iteration for LLMs.

[re-thc]

> Plus Go compilation speed/test running provides quick iteration for LLMs

How is Java slow in any of these? Plenty of tricks e.g. AppCDS before the tests.

[st3fan]

All you need is a JAVA_CODING_GUIDELINES.md with some hints about what kind of Java code you like the agent to write.

[datsci_est_2015]

All you need is [to encode all of the lessons you’ve learned about style and best practices over your entire career into a single markdown file].

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

[roegerle]

breaking changes? hardly.

[hu3]

Yes, breaking changes. And many ways to do the same thing because the language kept evolving (thankfully).

[nitwit005]

There is a decently long list of breaking changes now. Removing JavaEE modules from the JDK, and restricting sun.misc.Unsafe, are the ones people usually run into.

[gf000]

These are relatively small-scoped library changes only though.

Meanwhile Go already had a language change, while being less than half its age (loop variable capture).

[nitwit005]

A long enough list of small changes eventually equates to a big change. People generally can't update applications from Java 8 or below to a new one without code updates.

[pants2]

Certainly not the "one way to write it" idea. Java has a ton of language features.

[gf000]

Not really. It has a pretty bare bones OOP (single inheritance, interface), primitives and objects, generics and pretty much that's it.

Newer features fit very nicely and didn't increase the language surface (records are just a normal class with some methods auto-generated, while sealed types are just a restriction on who can subtype an interface -- and yet these give full ADT support for the language that improves readability and type safety).

[jimbokun]

Annotations add a seemingly infinite amount of new semantics. You can’t predict anything with confidence just looking at the code without also studying the annotation processors in depth, which regular Java tools don’t help you with.

[gf000]

Well, that's just metaprogramming.

Also, java annotation processors are strictly "append-only", they can't change code written as is. They may subclass it, or build new classes that make use of the annotations.

In my experience LLMs are more than happy with annotations, especially from the widely used ones (spring/jakarta ee, lombok though it's not an annotation processor, etc).

If you think about it, an annotation like @Path("/endpoint") is very informative for both humans and LLMs alike, being local to what it attaches to. Within an agent, the code serving the endpoint will be immediately visible in the context returned by a simple string search, no need to do another round of "find wherever this codebase registers routes".

[jim33442]

That metaprogramming is how a lot of places end up doing Java, because Java is a bad language that needs crutches like that. Or at least needed until whatever newer version fixed limitations of the old one, but all that old code is still around.

Biggest thing was lack of cooperative multitasking until virtual threads (Project Loom). And much older, lack of lambdas before Java 8.

[Orygin]

Annotations are a scourge. Automagic extensions you have to understand through years of usage.

Go has no such things and you have circled back exactly to the GP's point: "There's a ceiling on abstraction". There is no such ceiling in java ime

[jimbokun]

It’s even simpler to have a “register” method that takes the path specification, the HTTP verb, and a function to handle the request.

There is no case where annotations are superior to the meta programming facilities built into the language proper. Annotations only became popular because Java didn’t have easy syntax for function references or anonymous functions for a very long time.

[cryptos]

Project Lombok rewrites code, however it misuses annotation processing.

[EGreg]

I wonder what people will say to that.

I personally think neither Go nor Java would be good for "agents". Better to have them sandboxed in WASM.

[gf000]

Sandboxing is a completely orthogonal issue and WASM is probably not a good direct target for LLMs.

Of course writing a language that compiles to Wasm is certainly a way, but you would have to sandbox also all the other tools that is used during development (e.g. agents can just call grep/find/etc).

[r_lee]

WASM isn't a language you'd want to program with. you can't verify outputs nor is there any proper training data aside from examples and such

[seertaak]

How are JVM startup times nowadays? Frankly the need to ship with a JVM (modulo graal admittedly) is a drawback, eg for CLI tools - which the author listed as a requirement. Go's static executable story, combined with it's competitive performance - without C++ or rust contortions - is a strong combo when your focus is on startup time and deployment simplicity. (If, otoh, I cared a lot about GC I'd definitely prefer Java - eg for non-fast algo trading.)

Java is a fine language, tech stack, and ecosystem, but I agree with the author and parent commenter that this is a sweet spot for Go. Their decision to use it makes a lot of sense.

[xannabxlle]

Exactly, the propping up of Go seems unfounded. Java in it's newest iterations make it more compelling as a target, and people, especially young people, overlook it because of its stigma as enterprise cruft.

[jim33442]

Most of the young people like me learned Java as a first language in AP Computer Science, then probably again in college. We were tested thoroughly on all the OOP details and required to use that in projects. The most popular video game is/was also in Java, and people love to mod it.

But still nobody wants to use it given the choice, because it sucks. 75% of the code you write is boilerplate mainly thanks to OOP, the com.foo.bar stuff is an eyesore, and it somehow uses even more RAM than Python. That's without getting into the enterprise cruft land where each method has 3 annotations on it, where the annotations themselves are maintained by an entire outsourced team.

[gf000]

Well, you should have learned about the language something in the meanwhile then.

75% boilerplate, come on. It has records and pattern matching now. Many of the cases of boilerplate are strictly self inflicted. And this criticism is absolutely laughable in a thread about Go, where you have to repeat some error ritual every 3 lines, losing the signal in all the noise. Java is a much more concise language than Go.

com.foo.bar solves a very real issue that is a big problem in e.g. the Node and Rust ecosystem (package name squatting).

And it uses as much RAM as you set it to use. It's true of every managed language that more memory equals less work to do, that is better throughput. But Java's GCs are the state of the art, it will work just fine with half the pre-configured memory.

[jim33442]

Records and pattern-matching didn't exist back then and are only used in new codebases. That isn't enough to fix it anyway.

The Go error handling is bad enough that it makes the lang not a top choice for me. Seems like entire vision of Go was being the opposite of C++ in every way, and that resulted in something halfway decent, but it unfortunately doesn't use exceptions. You get stuff done in fewer loc than in Java at least, and it always had solid m:n greenthreading, and the GC just works without having to tune it.

[anthonypasq96]

im a java guy, but it simply takes too long to start up and uses too much memory to be a reasonable language for ai agent development.

[cryptos]

However, the cause it not really Java as such, but massive frameworks and tooling (e.g. Maven). Maybe AI will bring some fresh air to Java, because old truths might no longer be valid. But it will be hard to get rid of old habits because it manifested in AI training data.

[gf000]

"AI guys" use Claude CLI that renders to a terminal via freakin' react.

Come on, java starts up fast enough and the memory usage can be set (better throughput vs less memory, it's a classic tradeoff. Go just defaults to worse throughput).

Really, without some fat framework doing all kinds of initialization stuff, java code starts up practically instantly.

[jim33442]

Java takes flags for min/initial/max memory that, as a strict law of nature, are always wrong the first time you try. And it holds onto unused memory unless you pass another flag. Idk exactly why there's no reasonable default for that, but probably cause it's in a VM. No other language has this problem.

[gf000]

It does give back memory nowadays.

And it's not really a VM in that sense of the word. It's a runtime, Go also has such a runtime it's just bundled.

[Orygin]

> Come on, java starts up fast enough and the memory usage can be set

Yeah it can be adjusted, on the other hand you have a language that just works. Starts instantly and memory usage is bounded by usage, not guesstimate of how much the JVM will need.

> Really, without some fat framework doing all kinds of initialization stuff, java code starts up practically instantly

Have you many java projects that didn't use some fat framework? Good for you if you did, but 100% of java project I had the displeasure of touching were huge mess with deprecated frameworks on ancient java versions.

[yaseer]

Except that Go is a simpler, smaller language than Java. That's one of the key points in the post.

[gf000]

More simplistic, not really simpler.

[3371]

I guess you misunderstood he meant simpler as in "easier"? Because I thought Something simplistic is simple...? Not an English native tho.

[jen20]

The points about tooling certainly do not apply to Java, for example, Maven vs Gradle (which is a huge mess in and of itself - do you use Kotlin or Groovy), and which plugins are you willing to pull in? Or is Ant still the thing? SpotBugs, Spotless? What test framework do you use? Do you use Mockito or one of the myriad alternatives?

Go has _none_ of this nonsense, and it's better for it. Nor does Rust, FWIW, which IMO is also a better target language than Java for just about everything.

[cryptos]

Gradle could be used as an AI benchenmark on its own! The syntax of plugin DSLs changes all the time. Special credits could be achieved for handling old (Groovy) and new versions (Kotlin) of Gradle itself.

[onoesworkacct]

Think of the typical quality of Java that LLMs encounter vs the typical quality of Go.

You've almost certainly got more experts-exchange.com than github.com

[JimBlackwood]

I mostly write Go code (and have barely had to write any code myself in the past months), but today I had to do some work in a Java project and Claude Code was a terrible experience.

It really felt like using AI tooling of a year or two ago. It wasn’t understanding my prompts, going on tangents, not following the existing style and idioms. Maybe Claude was hungover or doesn’t like mondays, but the contrast with Go was surprising.

One example is that I wanted to add an extra prometheus metric to keep track of an edge case in some for loop. All it had to do was define a counter and increment it. For some reason it would define the counter the line before increment it, instead of defining it next to the other counters outside of the for loop. Technically not wrong (defining a counter is idempotent), but who does that? Especially when the other counters are defined elsewhere in the same function?

Anyway, n=1 but I feel it has an easier time with Go.

[gf000]

Well, there was a Claude outage today, maybe related :D

My n=1 is that it is pretty good with Java, on par with other popular languages like Python and JS, in line with these 3 probably being a good chunk if not the majority of training data.

[jmyeet]

I agree with most of this. You can learn Go syntax in an afternoon. Idiomatic Go takes a little longer but it just doesn't have the complexity footguns C++ does. But you can shoot yourself in the foot somewhat in Go. I'm talking about buffered channels, which are a mistake most of the time and a premature optimization almost all of the time, and you can explode your program with goroutines. But honestly it's not bad.

Python is an interesting one because it's not always obvious the program is wrong or will fail, thanks to dynamic typing.

But another problem is the Python philosophy since 3.0. Where once backwards compatibility was treated as almost sacrosanct, 3.0+ does not. 2.7 persisted for so long for this reason. But minor releases in 3.x make breaking changes and it's wild to me.

I just wish Go had cooperative async/await rather than channels because (IMHO) cooperative async/await is a vastly superior abstraction to unbuffered channels in particular.

[muyuu]

I'd have said the same a few months ago, but looking at the code quality that the SotA LLMs right now I have to say it's excellent and the problems they have are not with the language but with the subject problems, esp. when they require some complex design that isn't well documented beforehand. They seem to struggle with keeping a world model. Languages themselves, they run circles around humans.

Now the case for Go or for other tightly standardised languages is that whatever the LLM produces, you're likely to be familiar with and make sense of its decisions. With C++, you can generally steer the LLM to refactor things in a certain way but it's extra steps. With Ruby it works surprisingly well too. I'm a lot less happy with their results in Lisp or in Bash/zsh for instance, and mixed results in C depending on what you give them to start - they just come with such random stuff. But it may be just a matter of training set and the relative free-form of those languages.

[treyd]

> But LLMs don't care about expressiveness, they care about predictability.

I think this is true, but it misses a very key point. Go does an impressively bad job at designing APIs that are difficult to misuse, so LLMs will misuse them and will require also writing unit tests to walk through it, just to validate it used the libraries correctly. This isn't always possible (or is awkward/cumbersome) for certain scenarios like database querues.

All of the reasons people argue Go is good for LLMs are more true for Rust. You and the LLM can design libraries to be difficult to misuse, and then get instant feedback from the compiler to the LLM about what it did wrong, and often with suggestions about how it should fix them! This also makes RL deriving from compiler feedback more effective.

This allows the LLMs to reason more abstractly at larger scales, since the abstractions are less leaky (unlike in Go). The ceiling on abstraction screws you here, since troubleshooting requires more deep diving. It's the same reason Go projects become difficult for humans at large scales, too.

[Thaxll]

Go is not difficult to maintain at large scale, I mean take Kubernetes for example, it's "trivial" to understand and modified even though it's in the millions loc.

[treyd]

Kubuernetes is built by a trillion dollar company who has the resources to manage QA and dev tooling at a scale that the vast majority of teams do not.

[nextaccountic]

Rust happens to be my favorite language, but I will say that the Rust has a massive churn on libraries and frameworks

Rust got a severe case of npm-itis

[jimbokun]

Go’s much faster compile times are a big advantage over Rust.

[wakawaka28]

Rust is unstable and slow to compile. I think these two features make it bad for LLMs and everything else.

[maleldil]

Why do you say it's unstable?

[auxiliarymoose]

Take async for example. You have to choose some third-party async runtime which may or may not work with other runtimes, libraries, platforms, etc.

With Go, async code written in Go 1.0 compiles and runs the same in Go 1.26, and there is no fragmentation or necessity to reach for third party components.

[wakawaka28]

It is literally being changed constantly. They chose to add it to the Linux kernel but they have to build the features they need into the language as they go. It's not backward compatible like C and C++ either. Sure, there are a couple of versions you could try to pin to in Rust, but then all your libraries need to be pinned to the same version (to be fair, this last part is an assumption).

[stouset]

I think very nearly every assertion in this statement is demonstrably untrue.

[wakawaka28]

It's not, especially the part about it being actively changed to adapt to Linux. I've heard several complaints about this already. I may have been a little harsh on the stability concerns but I stand by my assertions in general.

[ithkuil]

I think the relevant problem of rust to this thread is not that it's unstable (it isn't unstable!) but it can be argued that it's a moving target

[OoooooooO]

Where is Rust unstable?

[ForHackernews]

Rust is harder for the bot to get "wrong" in the sense of running-but-does-the-wrong-thing, but it's far less stable than Go and LLMs frequently output Rust that straight up doesn't compile.

[gizmo686]

LLMs outputting code that doesn't compile is the failure mode you want. Outputting wrong code that compiles is far worse.

Setting aside the problems of wrong but compiling code. Wrong and non-compiling code is also much easier to deal with. For training an LLM, you have an objective fitness function to detect compilation errors.

For using an LLM, you can embed the LLM itself in a larger system that checks it's output and either re-rolls on errors, or invokes something to fix the errors.

[zozbot234]

If you use the stable version of Rust, it's stable. There's a very strong commitment from the Rust folks on that specific point.

[J_Shelby_J]

The only thing I see is the LLM not being aware of new features, so I have to specify the version rust.

[jen20]

Having a .rust-toolchain file and the edition in Cargo.toml should achieve this - and both of these should be done anyway!

[TrueSlacker0]

A lot of those pros apply to c# as well. Which claude and gemeni both do very well with.

[bwestergard]

Or Java, for that matter.

[jki275]

Preach.

Golang is the best language there is for most workflows that aren't bare metal embedded or have real time requirements, and this is coming from a 20 year+ C++ dev.

[CuriouslyC]

This has been studied, Kotlin/C#/Elixir beat it handily.

[cryptos]

Do have any links to back this up? I'd be really interested.

[wiseowise]

> Python only dominated early AI coding because ML researchers write Python and trained on Python first. It was path dependence, not merit.

Python doesn’t need dependence to prove its merit. There’s a reason why it is one the major programming languages and was top 1 for a while.

[fridder]

It is easy to get started in. Some of the major warts it has, at least the ones that annoy me, revolve around deployment and management. Python packaging has been "fixed" at least 6 times

[wuschel]

I wonder: How does Rust and Haskell compare to Go when it comes to LLM code generation? I was always thinking that the compiler induced feedback loops could give these languages an edge?

What would be the best language properties for LLM assisted coding?

[truelinux1]

> 'The thing nobody wants to say is that the reason serious programmers historically hated Go is exactly why LLMs are great at it: There's a ceiling on abstraction.

This lines up neatly with the kind of low‑abstraction systems I like running: 2021 HP PC with i7, bare‑metal‑ish, Crunchbang++, no desktop, openbox window manager. Boots to login in 17 seconds. Terminal front and center — local AI bare-metal inference, no wrapper, ffmpeg, ffplay, etc.

Go’s “no abstraction ceiling” feels like the same preference at the language level: shallow stack, no indirection, and code that stays close to the metal. That’s why LLMs work so well on Go: it’s opinionated, predictable, and there’s usually one obvious way to do things. Personally, I've come to love a LACK of abstraction.