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by zadikian 92 days ago
Go use cases overlap the most with Java. I think the reputation you mentioned comes from Google using a lot of C++ for high-level things others would likely do in Java, so they see Go as a replacement for C++ in some areas. (assuming you meant C++ not C)
1 comments
owlstuffing 92 days ago
> I think the reputation you mentioned. . .

Actually no. Go was designed from the beginning as a systems language as a C replacement.

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gf000 92 days ago
In what way does that "design" show up in Go, besides marketing?
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owlstuffing 92 days ago
It's replete with oddities and limitations that signal "ah, this is because systems language."

Go’s type system, for example, is very much a systems-language artifact. The designers chose structural typing because it was lighter weight, but provided enough type safety to get by. It sucks though for enterprise app development where your team (and your tooling) are desperate for nominal typing clarity and determinism.

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zadikian 92 days ago
The error handling is like a systems language for sure, I'll agree on that.

But where do Go's docs or founders call it a C replacement? gf000 asked where this is mentioned besides marketing, but I don't see it in the marketing either.

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owlstuffing 92 days ago
Now that Go is styled as a Java competitor its framing is different. But here's an old golang.org archive for fun:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091113154831/http://golang.org...

The main page title *Go: a systems programming language*

It still sports all the low-level stuff too, pointer arithmetic and all.

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zadikian 91 days ago
Thanks. I'm not surprised they called it a C++ competitor back then. All those systems-style features do make it awkward now that it's targeting the Java-like use cases. No pointer arithmetic, but pointers yeah, and it's not very clear what you're supposed to pass by value vs by ref. You can do things like a DBMS in Go that count as systems programming, but for sure it's not a competitor with C.

Go happened to be attractive for web backends too because it had good greenthreading before Java etc did, and better performance than JS, so it makes sense that they changed the marketing.

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gf000 92 days ago
And a fat runtime with a garbage collector. Like people can write all sorts of programs with a GC, that was never the issue.

But then just stay truthful, otherwise C# is also a system PL.

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