alt Hacker NewsBut what is the selling point for Go? I get that it is allegedly hailed to be a simple language with basically no batteries included, but why is that a selling point? Does Go excel at anything no other language does?
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Go has a very full featured standard library.
It's simple (do you really ask why that's a selling point?)
It's fast to compile.
It's fast to run.
It's good with parallelism.
It has myriads of examples, and LLMs can pick it up well too.
It has good backing.
It has good tooling.
It's fun.
It statically compiles to a trivially deployable binary.
It's excellent at cross compiling.
It has good adoption.
1. It has first-class co-routines, so supports high concurrency without having to deal with async bullshit
2. It produces a dependency-less statically linked binary
3. Duck typed interfaces give you static typing with minimal ceremony. They are implemented even for types outside your own code base, which is a common pain point in Java or C#.
4. It compiles quickly
I really don't like the lang itself but nobody will deny it has a very strong ecosystem and stdlib for handling around 95% of many well-solved problems you are likely to encounter.
I picked Go because it tends to use fewer resources than Node.js, and startup time is quite fast.
For one thing it’s statically typed and has many fewer foot guns than Python, so the llm-produced code is more likely to do what you expect.
Performance? Second only to rust and other lower level langs. Surely you don't need this spelled out for you...
>I get that it is allegedly hailed to be a simple language
That might be its core feature if you do agentic coding.
I think that’s sort of the selling point no? It’s really boring. It has like -10 keywords, compiles insanely fast, and has a concurrency model that’s easy to use and read. LLMs are great at using Go tooling to sanity check along the way. It’s easy to write shitty Go but it’s really pleasant to work with if you find those things compelling.
No batteries!? Go has a huge stable standard library no other language even comes close to. Built in tooling for unit testing, performance testing, debugging, code formatting, package management, etc. And most go binaries can be compiled statically so libc is not even a dependency. Golang is the definition of batteries included.