[otikik]

> missing a lot of features

Not a lot of them - just some. And the missing ones, a lot of people don't miss anyway.

It also has things others languages don't - fast compilation, a big company behind it (while staying opensource), and simplicity.

> be pretty ugly and painful

Subjective. I like how it looks and have no pain.

> compared to javascript I can see the advantages though

It is not just "better than javascript". It is as expressive as ruby or python, with as much type safety as possible without giving up clarity or speed. And its type system doesn't require weeks to wrap your head around it.

[bsdetector]

> has things others languages don't - fast compilation

Never understood this talking point. What language other than C++ (and C to some extent) doesn't have fast compilation? And compared to these languages Go gets most of its compile speed simply by doing a really poor job optimizing. Compare times for -O0 and -O3 on other languages to see most compile time is dominated by optimizations.

Is this supposed to convince C/C++ programmers? Like "sure your program will run 50% slower and have garbage collection pauses, but it compiles faster!". This just boggles my mind.

[randallsquared]

I think this depends strongly on your development style.

If you come from the world of scripting languages, a common style is "write between one and twenty lines of code; run tests; edit three lines; run tests...", where "run tests" might literally be that, or might just be running the code to sanity check that things are not too broken. In this style, even a twenty second delay would become very painful.

I think people who learned on C, C++ or Java tend to write much larger pieces of code in between run attempts, simply because it takes (or took) a while to check your work, instead of being effectively instantaneous. I know at a previous position where I did some Java development, the "tomcat stop; ant remove; ant clean; ant install; tomcat start... okay, NOW you can test" was quite difficult to develop against iteratively, sometimes being measured in minutes instead of seconds.

[bsdetector]

> the "tomcat stop; ant remove; ant clean; ant install; tomcat start... okay, NOW you can test" was quite difficult to develop against iteratively

Ok this makes even less sense to me. In 10 years when Go has the completeness of these big Java systems it'll be even worse since there won't even be a dynamic loading option and the only choice will be to restart the entire system like that.

If you want to like Go because it has fast basic features and that's all you need that's one thing, but it doesn't have anything to do with compiling speed does it?

[Keats]

Scala is pretty slow

[TheDom]

You could call the compiler slow, but at runtime it's comparable to Java (= fast!).

[dlisboa]

Compilation time is the only thing in discussion in this thread.

[adamlett]

> It is as expressive as ruby or python

I like Go too, but lets not kid ourselves here. Ruby is vastly more expressive than Go. (I'm sure Python is too, but I am not a Python programmer, so I am not in a position to say).

[otikik]

You are right, I exaggerated there :)