[rdtsc]

As someone else already said, this should not be Go it should be Dart.

Go in this case is seen sort of an in-between C and Java. But Go is not really as fast as C as much as we want it to be. So I don't know. Maybe it will be useful for something already written in Go to be ported. But I would rather see Dart succeed as a higher level-than java development language (both on Android and on the Web).

Years back I hoped Python would do that (being Guido was at Google and all). But as he confessed there was a minor political struggle internally over it and Guido lost. Not too long after he left Google.

[oscargrouch]

I used to think like you too.. but after Jobs/Apple launched the iPhone the trend for jitted languages, as popularized by Java in the nineties is going down..

Because of the phones and batteries, AOT languages are more valued and even ordinary jitted languages are getting a AOT compiler.. ART for Java and even .Net

So Dart would need to have a AOT compiler first to make it more appealing to mobile phones.. also i think a lot of apps would not like to be distributed in source code form..

So langs like Go now are on the rise.. its funny how technology trends change over the decades... not while ago it was all about dinamic languages..

[stcredzero]

It has always been about language features, abstraction power, and maximized interactivity. Exactly how one achieves these isn't the main point.

[oscargrouch]

Its all about influential people in tech, managing popular platforms deciding what technology to use for their platforms..

Eg. Basic, Javascript, Objetive-C

As i dont think people actually conciously choose to write in those languages because of its features.. thats why we have so many people grumpy about those technologies..

Languages that we choose because of better features, pretty often loose in popularity and adoption..

Sometimes those languages have some heroic comunity efforts and a vibrant community that can make it stand.. but this is pretty rare.. Python, Ruby(because of Rails)

It has almost the same mechanics of the fashion industry.. Some influential people decide what we gonna wear on the next 5 years..

We can use our "hobby language" of choice, because its our own decision.. but in the end of the day.. we have to mantain and work in code on those languages missing the "features, abstraction power and maximized interactivity" we love so much

[stcredzero]

As i dont think people actually conciously choose to write in those languages because of its features

Incorrect, or at least badly lacking historical context and perspective.

Basic: interactive. (Primitive REPL.)

Javascript: it was there. If it wasn't there, everywhere but influential people just wrote about it then it would have languished. Also, it is interactive.

Objective-C: has a lot of very good OO which was heavily influenced by Smalltalk. It is precisely the OO excellence that it was known for and which engendered fierce love for it in certain circles.

Remember also that these languages have been around for a long time, on hardware far less powerful than what we have today or even had a decade ago. The youngest of these languages is Javascript by far, and it is almost 20 tears old! For their day, they were advanced with respect to the programming mainstream by at least one measure. (In the Apple II days, BASIC was there, and it was interactive, and that was enough.)

I'm not saying these were the best available. But there is more to it than just fashion and influence/hype. (Otherwise we'd all just be using Java in the browser and for app servers.)

Also: Ruby was a hobby language once upon a time.

[xkarga00]

I never understood why everyone whines about Go's speed. The language, although stable, has a lot of potential into becoming much faster and performant. In every new version you can find speed-ups into different parts of it. I really don't worry about performance in Go. The Go team are very conscious about it and i am glad the bulk of development has been focused on things under the hood rather than adding features.