[dom96]

I find it rather annoying that everyone seems to be advocating Go, it may be a good language, but I can't help but feel that the only reason it's being used is because Google's behind it. You guys should look into alternatives like Nimrod (http://nimrod-code.org/), which is in fact a lot closer to Python than Go will ever be.

[MetaCosm]

People are advocating Go because it delivers. It has great concurrency primitives (channels), it is "boring" language syntax wise, and it is fast.

Beyond that, it deals with a lot of the 'ugly' things around the edges of other languages. Dependency management, build management, deployments... all these IMHO are much more well thought out in go.

[Araq]

It delivers? Lol. The GC used to suck for 32 bit systems and it still sucks for realtime. As opposed to Nimrod's which pretty much guarantees a maximum pause time of 2 milliseconds -- independent of the heap size. And that's only the start: Go also lacks generics and meta programming in general. And its memory/concurrency model is just as racy as Java's.

[karaziox]

Go was never designed for "realtime". Also, 32 bits wasn't the main compiler focus, 64 bits was. This problem being mainly fixed with the 1.1 release, this is a non issue now. The memory model seems pretty well defined without being too restrictive, with the recent addition of the race detector.. Go looks well equiped for this kind of problems and some pretty interesting projects are there to prove it.

[MetaCosm]

You are correct on some points. 32 bit was broken, realtime is a non-feature. It does (by design) lack generics and meta programming (Pike talked about these at length at one point).

I have to disagree on the concurrency model, I think message passing channels are a much more natural primitive to model concurrency in, and goroutines are exceptionally light.

EDIT: When you talk about nimrod, you might go ahead and mention you are the designer of nimrod... it might color your judgement.

[mwcampbell]

"Nobody is smart enough to optimize for everything, nor to anticipate all the uses to which their software might be put." -- Eric Raymond, _The Art of Unix Programming_

Go's primary niche is server software, and in that niche, it is gaining in popularity and has the backing of a large company. For servers, neither support for a 32-bit address space nor real-time support is important.

Does support for generics really matter when the language has built-in support for the most common collection types?

The allowance of shared mutable memory between goroutines does worry me somewhat.

[sergiotapia]

Personally, having it backed by Google makes Go better in my opinion. I feel a ton of smart, very insane individuals are working on it and it can only get better.

Nimrod? Never heard of it or the person backing it.

I'm _not_ a language snob, trust me! I'm just a regular, family guy, software developer and I try to put my proverbial eggs in reliable baskets.

Go doesn't seem to be going away any time soon and it's really really fast.

[dom96]

If you want to put your eggs in reliable baskets then why not use Java, or C#, or even C++. Those languages are most definitely not going to go anywhere anytime soon.

[sergiotapia]

Because I already know C#, and why waste time learning Java which is very similar; what would I gain?

I chose Go over C++, because it looks easier.

[dom96]

What do you gain from learning Go?

[sergiotapia]

Obscene speed and learning a language built with concurrency in mind.

[genwin]

Go's goroutines are superior to threads in C#.

C++ is harder and there's no garbage collection.

I now have to yet again close my apps and restart my computer for an IT-forced Java runtime update, for some app I rarely use. For that reason alone I'd not consider Java.

[dom96]

From what I can tell Go's goroutines are pretty similar to C#'s await functionality.

But I don't want you to use C#/C++/Java, I want you to use Nimrod.

[genwin]

I forgot that C# added more asynchronous stuff since I last coded in it. I used to love C# but it's more verbose than Go and I'm weary of the obfuscated MS documentation that pushes me straight to blogs. Also I gave up on using Windows for web development.

This is the first I've heard of Nimrod.

[Paradigma11]

Plus there is rx reactive, tpl and tpl dataflow.

[mwcampbell]

If I'm not mistaken, that's a fallacious slippery-slope argument. I'm still undecided on how to weigh language popularity against other factors, but surely relative popularity is an important factor in things that have a big effect on real-world software development, such as availability of libraries and tools. For now, at least, Go is much more popular than Nimrod, and also has more people working on the language implementation and surrounding tools.

[nobleach]

Perhaps. But in my travels, I have yet to find anyone really pushing Dart just because it's google. (perhaps it's still too early)