Thank you, rsc, for all your work. Development in Go has become much more enjoyable in these 12 years: race detector, standardized error wrapping, modules, generics, toolchain updates, and so on. And while there are still things to be desired (sum types, better enum/range types, immutability, and non-nilness in my personal wishlist), Go is still the most enjoyable ecosystem I've ever developed in.
IMHO Go has been one of the best-managed open source projects ever. Hats off to Google for supporting it.
What are some things that make it well managed?
The reluctancy to introduce new syntax too quickly (looking at you, TC39 and Babel) makes go an almost maintenance free language.
If you learned idiomatic go, you can maintain and patch other libraries in the ecosystem very quickly.
Unified codestyle, unified paradigms, unified toolchain.
It's a language with harsh opinions on everything. If you manage to get over your own opinions, you'll realize that any opinion upstream is better than no opinion downstream.
That's why go's toolchain isn't as messed up as npm, yarn, grunt, gulp, webpack, parcel, babel and other parts of the ecosystem that have no conventions and are therefore as a result very expensive to maintain.
This!
In Go, a feature needs to have an extremely good reason to be added, and even then it's only added with care and caution.
In other languages, pointless features are added because maintainers are afraid, or not empowered to say... "yeah, we get it, but no, we will not add cruft to the language because you can't write your own 2 line function to achieve the same, no matter how hard you dunk on us on Twitter, it's take it or leave it, but you won't tell us how to run this project"
Would you expand on the Python issue? I find recent Python additions either useful or non-intrusive, I wonder which ones you think are born out of FOMO.
Another example from another language: `class` added to JavaScript. Addition that was made to the language for something that already was possible, didn't add anything fundamentally new and added just because developers from other languages were more used to that particular syntax.
"Other languages have it" is a disease that's struck many languages in the past decade+, notably Javascript which added partial OOP support (classes but initially no access modifiers), or Java which added functional programming constructs via Streams.
I mean granted, Java needed some tweaks for developer ergonomics, and I'm glad they finally introduced value types for example, but I now find that adding entire paradigms to a language is a bad idea.
In the case of Go, yes it needed generics, but in practice people don't use generics that often, so thankfully it won't affect most people's codebases that much. But there's people advocating for adding more functional programming paradigms and syntax like a function shorthand, which is really frowned upon by others, because new syntax and paradigms adding to the things you need to know and understand when reading Go.
Plus at the moment / the way the language is designed, FP constructs do not have mechanical sympathy and are far slower than their iterative counterparts.
Yes about the language but also Google understands that both tooling and standard library is more important than the language. All of that makes Google internal maintenance much much better. Another artifact of google3 was the absolute shitshow of GOPATH and abysmal dependency management – because Google didn’t really need it, while people outside suffered. When they added go mod support Go became 10x more productive outside of Google.
Go is almost an anti-language in that sense, reluctantly accepting shiny lang features only after they’ve been proven to address major pain points. It’s almost more an “infrastructure deployment toolkit” than a language. Which strangely makes it extremely pleasurable to work with, at least for network-centric applications.
"That's why go's toolchain isn't as messed up as npm, yarn, grunt, ..."
And let's be honest, Rust toolchain is pretty messed up too.
Want to cross-compile with go? Set the GOOS variable and you are done. On Rust you need to curl-sh rustup, switch to nightly, add new targets, add target to your cargo and cross fingers it works this week.
1) git config --global url.ssh://git@github.com/.insteadOf https://github.com/
2) export GOPRIVATE='github.com/_company/*'
If you are doing embedded work, which is where you often do cross-compiling, you still need nightly.
But that's a whole different can of worms.
Still 100x better than cross-compiling C
With it being so consistent and predictable, I wonder why it hasn’t displaced .NET and Java in the enterprise for back end development.
Maybe because a framework like ASP.NET or Spring that covers like 80+% of the enterprise needs hasn’t quite emerged? Or perhaps we just need to give it a decade or so.
There are still very few Go jobs in my country, most are either .NET, Java or PHP.
> usually have lots of layers for organizational reasons
The ridiculous number of layers in Java or C# are more of a skill and guidance issue than anything else. Older languages don’t always mean over-attempted-abstraction (think C, for example).
> and I think that APIs should be HTTP-cacheable
Rendering html on the server does not make it not cacheable.
The vast majority of people do not need graphql or shift their compute to the client with a junk react app with adhoc json endpoints everywhere.
Go is displacing .NET where I work for backend development. We still use .NET for Windows GUIs but any sort of server code is mostly Go going forward.
In my enterprise neck of the woods Go is steadily taking over backend development.
Thankfully, it is enough that it is a must in DevOps space.
It's not yet an enterprise language; along the languages/frameworks, there's a huge ecosystem of QA, monitoring, security, etc solutions in the Java/.NET space that just isn't there in Go.
I mean there's a slow shift, I keep hearing of "rewriting a Java codebase to Go", but it'll be a slow process. And especially the bigger projects that represent 30 years of Java development will and should be reluctant to start rewriting things.
Clutter death that creeps in any language, as I see it. To this day, only a small subset of JS syntax is used; I cannot recall anyone besides me ever using method chaining like .map .filter, etc.
There is a reason why almost every good language is somewhat akin to C to this day, and maybe people started over to get rid of the noise.
> I cannot recall anyone besides me ever using method chaining like .map .filter, etc.
Interesting. That's all anyone on my team ever used once it became available.
But, it highlights the point with Go. Working with Go for just a little while means I can easily read and work with nearly any Go project with a very short ramp up.
Haha interesting. I actually like .map/.filter/.find/etc. in JS and comprehensions in Python. I find they communicate the intent of the programmer really clearly as compared to a for-loop.
> The reluctancy to introduce new syntax too quickly (looking at you, TC39 and Babel) makes go an almost maintenance free language.
Could you provide some examples of this? From knowledge of the pipeline operator proposal[0], moving fast and breaking things isn't always a priority.
It goes without saying that Babel is an external collection of modules that don't fall under the TC39 umbrella, so they're able to iterate at a much greater cadence than the official specification (and you obviously need to explicitly opt-into using it.)
[0]: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator/commit/da... (first commit; Nov 9, 2015, which is 8 years, 8 months, 24 days ago)
Well, if you compare against the absolute bottom of the barrel, it's not too hard to look good.
> Unified codestyle
The moment I got my first compile error due to an unused variable and an unused import, made me realize Go is not a serious programming language.
This has saved me minutes of confusion so many times.
https://research.swtch.com/deps#watch_your_dependencies
> Creeping dependencies can also affect the size of your project. During the development of Google’s Sawzall—a JIT’ed logs processing language—the authors discovered at various times that the main interpreter binary contained not just Sawzall’s JIT but also (unused) PostScript, Python, and JavaScript interpreters. Each time, the culprit turned out to be unused dependencies declared by some library Sawzall did depend on, combined with the fact that Google’s build system eliminated any manual effort needed to start using a new dependency.. This kind of error is the reason that the Go language makes importing an unused package a compile-time error.
I think the fundamental reason behind this behavior is just Go's rejection of the concept of compiler warnings. Unused variables must either be A-ok or trigger an error. They chose the second option for unused variables. Some other code smells are considered A-ok by the compiler and need to be caught by linters.
Why not? Pretty sure it's used in a lot of places, so it does seem quite serious if a language.
Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
Couldn't agree more. Always felt community had trust in the team. Its not the fanciest language, but whatever they push for usually works. In contrast, recently I've had to deal with Swift, and they are often pushing like 10 features, but each of them is full of holes and annoyances. Great respect for doing the boring of keeping it stupid and simple.
I suspect all the drama happens internally.
Does ex-googler counts? Then Filippo Valsorda...
One reason I consider it so good
They are the programming language equivalent of GitHub repos that maintain a low open issue count by closing most issues as "won't fix" or "won't build".
Yep. It takes a lot of bravery and I appreciate it!
> Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption.
Unfortunately that’s not at all true - Go is a real outlier here. If it were true, we’d all be writing C instead of C++, Lua instead of Python and ES5 instead of TypeScript.
Good
The cost being that they [generally speaking] ignore proposals, pull requests, and new features - even if they are valuable to their users and AREN'T breaking.
Mostly this comes down to recognizing the value of simplicity. I like Rust and Go, but I am infinitely grateful that Go is as minimal as it is. I wouldn't have had as much success ramping my team on Rust.
> almost zero drama
Hm. Wasn't (the lack of) generics pretty drama filled? Especially the way they fought against it for so long.
s/fought against it/rejected superficial proposals that were mostly about syntax bikeshedding and didn't include enough research on how the proposal would play along with the rest of the language and ecosystem/
Almost zero drama, yeah. I do remember the dep drama though...
And the telemetry drama.
Absolutely inaccurate. Pointer de-reference operator had a breaking change after 1.x
I don't recall this off-hand; which change was that?
I mean they did say almost no breaking changes, depending how much has changed in the language, a small handful of breaking changes in niche use cases may be considered almost none by some. I'm not sure I would say the comment is absolutely inaccurate.
Zero drama is easy when you get paid (a lot) to work on something.
That's private drama. For all we know there has been loads, but it's private so you can't see it.
Pretty sure Musk gets a decent paycheck, and manages to be involved in plenty of drama.
I would rather say that it is easy to have zero drama when most of the committers come from a single large companies.
And yet we've had lots of drama in Linux and Redhat mailing lists, involving people paid to work on the respective projects, and using their work email.
> It's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a year ago would work today
Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression the editions took care of that.
Your question answers itself. It's growing in popularity in every year and has apparently suffered exactly zero scandals or embarrassing gaffes of any kind. Just not fucking up is huge in making any serious enterprise successful and very, very difficult to achieve.
Just from the top of my head there's the Google proxy shenanigans and the telemetry proposal that they backed down from. There may be others I'm not aware of.
Explain how Google proxy "shenanigans" are any different than "npm proxy shenanigans" or "cargo shenanigans" or "pip shenanigans". It's a service to improve Go ecosystem with anti-spoof security design (which can't be said about those other code download services).
telemetry design is actually very thoughtful, limited and reasonable about what and how much data it sends. Motivation for sending the data is clear (improving Go). It's only a scandal for unreasonable people.
I did mean to ask: who "owns" Go for all practical purposes?
I suppose in theory it's some independent entity/commitee/whatever, but who pays the majority of the people working on it? Google?
> but who pays the majority of the people working on it? Google?
Checking the 20 top contributors from https://github.com/golang/go/graphs/contributors
Google: 10
Unclear: 7
Tailscale: 1
Canopy Climate: 1
Isovalent: 1
I think this is a side effect of golang having failed at the mission to replace C++ or even Java, becoming a replacement for ruby / python etc for API's. makes the project's goals align with users not about conquering the world anymore. as that battle is lost to Rust, Zig etc.
Go is definitely used for stuff that rivals their Rust/C++ etc. counterparts in terms of performance and general quality.
Caddy and docker pop right into my mind. I‘ve also seen databases, image processing and other nitty gritty systems programming related projects in Go.
People also love to write CLI apps in Go that do a lot of heavy lifting like esbuild or k6 etc.
The sweet spot for Go seems to be IO heavy programs. It allows for just enough control to get good performance for a lot of use cases that bleed into systems programming.
I thought the mission was to replace C++ for a many things at Google. You can't really lose to someone you are not competing with. The choice of managed memory is a pretty obvious hint that Go isn't a general direct competitor to C/C++.
And neither Zig nor Rust have replaced C++ to any meaningful degree. Nearly everywhere it would count I still will have to deal with C++ for years, if not decades, to come.
Yeah, only supporting glibc behaviors and ignoring the ELF standard at will really qualifies as best managed. /s
I replied to the other copy of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41136122.
[flagged]
> Basically, the Go team is a bunch of old white dudes, which already means the project is poorly managed from the start
This seems like a broad generalization. Can you please elaborate?
[flagged]
That argument completely makes sense (I don’t know if it’s true, because I know absolutely zero about the go community, but it’s a sensible argument). It’s a pity that to make it, you initially used the shorthand of “old white dudes“ - a derogation based on people’s race, sex and age.
> Special attention like having diverse people in positions of power.
You realize that selecting people based on "diverse" qualities is the very act of racism/sexism/whatever-ism, right? You propagate what you claim to oppose.
What? The only Plan 9 people that were on the Go team I know of are Thompson, Pike and Russ. I'm pretty sure that neither Thompson nor Pike know what 4chan is. Russ, being the younger one, probably has heard of it, but I doubt that he ever used it. I've never heard them make sexist jokes. On the contrary, I have heard Pike and rsc speak out for diversity in software engineering and social justice quite often.
Individual people cannot be diverse.
> I don’t believe that the “BDFL” (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project
It's interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.
I've noticed: competent people who aren't interested in leadership tend to make the best leaders.
As compared to people who want to be leaders, for the sake of being known as a 'leader', but have neither the competency nor accountability to be leaders.
As long as they aren't so disinterested that they become absentee leaders. It's rare for huge successful projects you've heard of, but I think the typical project is more likely to have this problem, although maybe it's just incompetence too.
I've seen this sentiment repeated here and I completely disagree.
The best leaders are interested in being leaders for the betterment of their team/community, not for the clout. But people who are pushed to be leaders without being interested in that, they tend to suck and make life miserable for everyone else. Leadership is a skill, if you treat it differently, you will suck at it.
Without taking a stand on the first half of that, I don't think it's particularly surprising that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their power. I'd argue the main benefit of having a single person with the power to make a unilateral decision is that it provides a way around the gridlock that tends to occur whenever there are a wide variety of stakeholders involved;. a project whose leader feels warranted to overrule decisions that have a strong consensus is a lot less likely to build up a community to the point that anyone is aware of the project.
I don't think this is true. Python had a BDFL and it didn't seem to benefit much from it. I'm not sure what other projects this attitude draws from. Off-hand I'd guess it causes less drama but no appreciable increase of quality, just like other forms of bureaucracy.
Meanwhile there's entire landfills of failed projects with single owners who couldn't bend enough. We just don't find this worth discussing.
Of course this won't happen, but a man can dream.
Python became #1 language in the world. Which factors lead to this success is debatable, but leadership role can't be dismissed.
Here are some other projects that benefited from BDFLs in my opinion:
* Keras
* Ruby
* Clojure
* Zig
* OCaml
* Vim
* Elixir
I think all of these have ended up being unusually coherent. I may not agree with their design philosophy, but there clearly is one.
Conversely, projects without clear leadership include rust (recently) and R, and I think they suffer for it.
A very widespread system for organising people is to have a single responsible decision-maker, supported, monitored and advised by a committee. We see that through politics and business, and a lot of the best open source projects seem to do the same thing.
IMO C++ would have benefitted from having a BDFL for a bit longer as well.
A perhaps important clarification:
Many of those, including Linux as far as I know, simply started as projects that were driven by single authors with a strong vision and remarkable diligence.
Then people flocked to those projects, but with the understanding and appreciation of that vision.
I don’t think any of them wanted to be BDFLs for the sake of power. They were the original authors and _made_ something useful. I don’t think any of them took over an existing project and declared themselves dictators. Ironically they all would be way too opinionated to do so.
But php, one of the most notoriously chaotic mainstream languages, has a bdfl. And lua, arguably more disciplined than all of the ones you listed, has not.
PHP is governed by an RFC process requiring a 2/3 majority vote of a couple dozen core devs. This has been the case for nearly 20 years now. Rasmus rarely even votes these days.
Rasmus is not the BFDL for PHP.
Linux, OpenBSD? Perhaps to an extent Mutt too.
Linux/Linus Torvalds stands out as another notable BDFL.
And Daniel Robbins at Gentoo, who recently (and sadly) stepped down from Funtoo as well.
I'm not intimate with Linux as a project, but this is an attractive argument for it. Unfortunately my main experiences with Torvalds are motivated by his chewing out people on mailing lists for something stupid they said rather than fending off varied interests, which makes him look far more petty than competent.
Torvalds also listened, learned and improved. If we want people to respond to constructive criticism constructively, it's uncharitable and counterproductive to pigeonhole them as they were at a point in time.
> it's always been someone breaking something or something along those lines
Not only is this a complete lie, but God forbid there's a process in place to catch these things instead of verbally abusing your coworkers for making mistakes, which Linus has done himself.
> Imagine every outburst you have is public and pointed to for years to come
You may be surprised to learn that the rest of us don't talk to anyone like this.
> but being hung up over a few incidents over a 30-year time period
That's a great way to make it sound old but he actually gets angrier as time goes on. https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02866.html
Linux started on Usenet, and that was the normal communication style. People simply did not take it seriously back then, it was understood to be partly humorous.
Linus doesn't even rant frequently either. People point to the same 10 messages over and over again.
He also tolerates when someone snaps back at him, unlike in projects with double standards like CPython where the old boys can do whatever they like but you are not allowed to criticize back or point out their numerous mistakes, segfaults, threading bugs and generally low code quality.
The only people worth having in power are the ones that don't want the power.
This extends well beyond OSS projects.
The whole idea is a joke, it's right there in the name. It was a recognition of the "facts on the ground" of GvR's role as the creator of Python, it was never seriously meant as a principle of project management. It's descriptive not prescriptive, eh? The idea got reified all out of hand.
The wording may be a joke but the concept is real and widely used.
Yes, but only by fools.
Remember when they tried to king George Washington?
rsc, thank you very much for all the hard work on the language that brought me into software engineering.
Despite playing around with several programming languages, Go still feels like home.
The development experience is terrific and I really appreciate how unapologetically simple and responsible the language and its creators have been.
Good luck and all the best in all your endeavours!
> rsc, thank you very much for all the hard work on the language that brought me into software engineering.
You're quite welcome, and thank you for this comment. I never expected when we started that Go would have such a positive impact on people's lives, bringing new people into programming and software engineering. That's definitely the impact I'm most proud of.
Thank you guys from another fan! Go literally saved my career as a software dev: got burned out around 2014, tried Go as therapy and have been a happy gopher ever since :)
Thank You rsc. This is sad because Go is one of the few language that is good and conservative instead of hype and feature creep. And that is primarily because you say No to a lot of things.
I do wonder, if you could re-do Go or another programming language again. What feature / changes would you add or take out.
I've been programming for 20 years and Go has proven to have more gravity than any other language I've used. When I just need to get something done, it's what I reach for. Thank you for your part in building such a useful tool.
Thanks for helping the OEIS site stay alive. I was absolutely delighted by it the first time I visited it, decades ago. Equally delighted when I visited recently and saw some “Russ Cox” contributed.
Same sentiment as the above poster. I’ve been working with Go since 2014, after using many languages before, and none match the ease and efficiency of development for my work. Thank you so much!
Thank you very much rsc! Golang not only helps me feed my family but also I created many friendships from using it :)
RSC has a really good blog: https://research.swtch.com/
This is the first time I'm noticing that rsc would be an initialism for the blog.
Me too!
:)
While you're still reading these, I want to say that while I've never ended up using Go for any shipping projects, I've been a fan since day 1. And it hasn't been lost on me that in the languages and ecosystems I do use in my professional life, good decisions from Go have propagated through the software world.
One thing that really sticks in my brain is gofmt; it makes it clear that there's still relatively low-hanging fruit where you can make a really good decision that spreads to the rest of the world on merits alone. It's an inspiration.
Incredible blog. I've said it on this site before, but his series on regular expressions is insanely high quality and the fact he just posted it there for all of us is a huge privilege.
Yes, I certainly benefitted very much from the series.
Here is the first episode - devastating, convincing, easy to understand and very well written:
Thanks for all the Go contributions!
I disagree on one point that has nothing to do with Go. Python has not benefitted from GvR stepping down. The new "leadership" is non-technical, tyrannical and has driven almost all true open source contributors away.
Development has stalled except for the few corporate contributions of doubtful quality. The atmosphere is repressive and all that matters is whether you have a position of power at Microsoft/Instagram/Bloomberg.
It is not necessarily the fault of these companies. They may not know that their generosity is being abused.
> Development has stalled except for the few corporate contributions of doubtful quality.
Do you have some data to back that up?
The stats on Github seem to show healthy activity. 700+ merged PRs from 120+ contributors in the last month [1].
There seems to have been a big influx of new contributors in the last few years. [2]
gofmt probably has alone saved so much time across the world (and is upstream from every other language ecosystem basically saying "ok let's just autoformat").
I hate what autoformatters do to my code, but I love not having to talk about spacing anymore.
Interestingly enough, I hate autoformatters (and use spaces instead of tabs) in every other language, but in Go you just get used to the way gofmt formats your code from the beginning, and then start to appreciate that you don't spend as much time on it anymore, so it's not a problem (at least for most people).
I've seen a number of autoformats for other languages be way too obsessive about formatting every little detail and edge case, to the point where it just becomes silly. 100% consistency is a fool's errand, and also contributes very very little Once you deal with some major issues (braces, spacing) you very quickly get diminishing returns.
One thing that I've found works kinda well: if you use a linter with "autofix" options, then the policy can be: complaint about formatting? Add the lint that can be autofixed. Then your formatter is just "run the lint autofixes"
TIL about the project he's going to focus on: https://go.googlesource.com/oscar/+/refs/heads/master/README...
An LLM-based architecture for helping maintain OSS projects. Seems cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwoWei-GAPo — Project has come a long way since this. Happy that it's still around and thriving. I don't think we expected that in 2009. I don't believe Go would have been where it is without Russ. His contribution to the project has been tremendous.
Thanks Russ.
Thanks Russ! Putting tooling on a first-class basis was revolutionary, and it's still Go's standout feature.
Russ gave us proper vendoring and generics: two things I thought I'd never see in Go... Thanks a lot for the effort!
Ian Lance Taylor did a lot of the work on generics, too. Thanks to both, and the rest of the team!
While vendoring is great, generics is bad addition to Go, since they complicated Go type system too much [1]. This makes typical Go code with generics hard to read and hard to maintain.
Language was literally castrated without generics.
Lack of generics didn't prevent from creating many useful projects in Go such as Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Terraform, etcd, minio, Caddy, Traefik, and many others from the list at https://github.com/search?q=language%3Ago+stars%3A%3E10000&t... . I haven't heard of useful Go projects, which couldn't be written because of lack of generics before Go1.18, and which have been created after that. Also I'm unaware of useful projects, which benefitted from generics in any measurable way.
Huge news! I hope the new leadership remembers that keeping golang small and simple was its greatest strength. Adding generics was too much, and while I think there are some important small cases when it's valuable, in practice people are using it when they shouldn't. I'd also like to see less google control of the project.
I'm certainly thankful for golang as it made my https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ project possible!
Thanks Russ!
> Adding generics was too much, and while I think there are some important small cases when it's valuable, in practice people are using it when they shouldn't.
Strongly disagree. Beyond very simple codebases lack of generics means either duplicating a bunch of code or eschewing type safety - neither of those things are particularly attractive to me. I can't imagine writing code in a strongly typed language that doesn't have support for generics.
Even if you don't use them directly it's almost certain you're using libraries that would be forced to be less ergonomic or type safe because of a lack of generics.
> or eschewing type safety
Type casts are checked.
> that doesn't have support for generics.
We get first class functions and compiled closures with zero syntax overhead. It's entirely manageable.
> or type safe because of a lack of generics.
Case in point: sort.Slice(). It lacks ergonomics, otherwise, entirely usable.
That being said, the generic version is faster and easier to use, so they are not without purpose, but they're not fundamental to large scale design either. Used without caution they can become a burden in and of themselves.
I like them just fine, but I could completely live without them.
BTW this kind of thing is why I don’t use Go.
Generics are a basic language feature for a statically typed language. Go needs a lot more features to be usable, like better error handling, but the ultra-conservative community that opposes any changes is a drag on the language and makes developing in it a miserable experience.
Please search/replace all `map[x][y]` in your Go projects with `map[sting]interface{}` in order to be honest and consistent with your opinion. And explain to all your stakeholders that you have done so because generics is bad.
You have been using a generic data-structure since Go 1.0 but did not realize this.
Interesting that they write "I don't use Go" but are still convinced that "developing in it [is] a miserable experience". So, which one is it now? I think many people would be positively surprised if they tried Go approaching it with an open mind, but all the FUD spread on HN and similar forums prevents that...
This is why I prefer Rust over Go. Go is far too simple.
error handling is what I like about go.
ok errors.As is a little stupid, I'll give you that. But that's all.
> Adding generics was too much
I strongly disagree. Sure, like anything in programming, generics can be misused. But even comments can be misused!
OTOH I am able to build things in Go with generics that I would not be very happy building without them.
The thing people dislike, I think, is that actually implementing generics and handling all the syntactical and compilation edge cases is complicated and ugly.
But generics as a high-level concept are wonderfully simple and useful ("let me use different types with certain code constructs without having to manually duplicate them, and stop me from doing anything that doesn't make sense"). It would be a far easier call for languages to add them if they were just a bit of syntactic sugar instead of a whole new section in the manual. (I do think adding generics was a good call; practicality trumps a fussily clean design, in my book.)
> But even comments can be misused!
And arguably are in Go, where they are used for all kinds of things that are not inline documentation!
examples of that? code generation? been away from go for a while, after using it some earlier, so not up to date
Yeah I agree. Due to Go's slow moving approach we'll see the biggest impact of generics much later, when they become more prominent in the standard library. A lot of those APIs are necessarily not type safe now and generics would close that gap quite nicely
> I'd also like to see less google control of the project.
That doesn't look like is going to happen — the leadership change announced here seems to me to continue on the Google path. Both Austin and Cherry are relatively unknown outside Google and are to my knowledge not active in the community outside Google.
> Both Austin and Cherry are relatively unknown outside Google and are to my knowledge not active in the community outside Google.
I don't believe this is true at all. They are both highly active in external Go development, far more active than I have been these past few years. (It's true that neither gives talks or blogs as much as I do.)
I understand and respect your perspective on Austin and Cherry’s involvement in the Go community. Their contributions may indeed be less visible but still impactful. However, the community’s perception of leadership is crucial, and visibility plays a big part in that. For instance your long form blog adds context to decisions you’ve taken in the past. I hope their active roles will become more apparent, fostering a stronger connection with the broader Go community.
> I'd also like to see less google control of the project.
What does this even mean? Google basically just finances the project, but doesn't really "control" anything, never mind that "Google" isn't a monolithic entity in the first place.
They could be a non-google employee. They could let the community vote on who new leaders are, etc...
> They could let the community vote on who new leaders are, etc...
Who is "they"? Who is "the community"? Who qualifies for a vote and who doesn't? I never contributed any code to the Go compiler or stdlib, but have contributed to some aspects of the "wider ecosystem", including some things that see fairly broad usage, and am (coincidentally) wearing a 2018 GopherCon t-shirt as I write this. Do I qualify? Does someone who has been writing Go for a year qualify? A week? Someone who never even wrote Go code? Someone who sent in a single patch to stdlib? And how do you verify all this?
Saying "let the community vote" is easy, but if you think about it for more than a second you will realize there's tons of difficulties and that it doesn't really work. I also don't really know of any project that works like this: it's pretty always a fairly small group of "core contributors" that get to decide.
> The notion that only Google could shepherd a programming language is hilarious.
I never said anything of the sort. I said that "let the community vote on who new leaders are" doesn't work. Python, PostgreSQL, and Rust don't work like that either; it's just members of a fairly small "core team" that can vote, or some variant thereof. I have no inside knowledge here, but I'll stake a good amount of money that the Go core team had a lot of discussions about this, and de-facto, it's more or less the same as having a vote – except maybe a bit less formal.
And Go would obviously be fine without Google, just as Rust was fine without Mozilla. But why bother? It's working fine as it is and Google wants to spend the money on developer salaries, so why not let them? People get far too hung up on "Google bad". I say this as someone who doesn't even have a Google account or Chrome installed.
It is tempting to look at the election in the US and ask what will determine the outcome - who has the policies that will make peoples lives better or who can come up with the most effecive derogatory nickname for the opponent and stoke the most fear.
I've worked at Google, I've used Go for about 8 years at this point and I've met a few of the key Go figures at some point. I have to say that I have _no_ idea who would be best to run the project. And neither do you.
This isn't politics where the winner gets to vanquish their enemies and make themselves and their friends and family rich. It's developing and maintaining a programming language. The only real reward you'll get is admiration IFF you do a good job. Do a crap job and you ruin the project and/or become a pariah.
I would rather have those people who make up the core leadership tell me who should run the project since they not only know the technology, but they know the people and they know how to provide continuity. Continuity and discipline is all-important.
I'd prefer it if whoever runs the project works for Google since that is where Go was born. In part for continuity reasons and that Google has proven to be a very good home for Go, but also because it is good to have direct access to an organization that has resources to support you.
Russ has done a great job of shepherding Go through over a decade of growth and maturity and has led a ton of fantastic additions to the language and built a strong pattern of excellence in how language changes are considered and made that should serve as a shining example for the future of Go as well as any other language out there.
And now he’s continuing the stretch of outstanding leadership by passing the torch. I can wait to see what the next 12 years of Go brings. Thanks for your service, Russ!
Out of interest, why are people so confident in Google when it comes to Go, yet every other day there's articles about how Google can't be trusted in related to Dart/Flutter which are soon to be abandoned?
I don't really know anything about Dart or Flutter, but they're entirely separate teams within a huge organisation. It's entirely possible that one team does an excellent job, whereas the other doesn't. I keep repeating this: but "Google" is not a monolithic entity. People aren't "confident in Google", they're "confident in the people working on Go" (or not: you can decide that for yourself).
Because Go has massive traction both inside and outside of Google, whereas Dart/Flutter never got big traction.
Dart only found a real good use case fairly recently. Given its explosion in usage since then, I think it may very well be more popular that go in several years.
Curious- what is the use case?
I think they mean Flutter, and Darts truly cross platform abilities.
I don't trust Google.
I trust specs[1], multiple implementations[2], and how easy it is to bootstrap a compiler[3].
[2]: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccgo/ (even if feature parity isn't quite there yet)
[3]: Instead of requiring double-digits compilation steps that each take too long to be reasonable.
I get an early-UNIX / Bell-Labs vibe from the entire Go project. New Jersey all the way. The ecosystem is too sleek and practical to abandon. My 0.02€, ymmv.
>New Jersey all the way
New Jersey vs. what? I read about that phrase sometime earlier but forgot the rest of it. Is it vs. MIT / Stanford / West Coast / other? implying worse is better vs. other?
is it also related to neat vs. scruffy approaches in AI?
too much in tech to keep track of it all.
but asking out of interest.
Well, it's kinda the whole "Worse is Better" thang. Flee from complexity.
As opposed to the "MIT style".
Related: Featuritis vs. YAGNI.
At any point in recent history, I would have been pretty happy sticking with the last release of go for quite some time. Flutter always feels like it's the next release that's going to be the good one.
> Google can't be trusted in related to Dart/Flutter which are soon to be abandoned
source?
I'm not agreeing with that assessment but recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997745
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40184763
Among others. Again I'm not saying I agree, I'm just saying you don't see the same with Go.
Off the top of your head, name 3 projects/apps that use Dart/Flutter, now do the same for go.
There are probably more Flutter apps about than you’d think, and at least on Android you can look for yourself: https://x.com/kevmoo/status/1819112503722627286
If you cant name 3 projects/app that use Dart/Flutter that just shows your bias.
Can you name 3 apps/projects that use COBOL?
-- This is akin to asking, "Quick, name 3 books written in Persian. Huh, you cant name them? Must be a dead language"
the part of your sentence before the comma is not fully related to the part after it.
iow, the first part does not imply the second part.
a lang could have a trustworthy future for maintenance of existing apps, like in terms of support from vendors, while not being a very good choice for greenfield applications, due to not having modern language features and libraries.
but there is so much cobol in critical infrastructure in the world that I don't think it is going away anytime soon. Google for some relevant threads on hn about it.
there is a good chance that some services critically important to you and your family rely on software written in COBOL running on mainframes. just like for everyone else in the developed world and some of the developing world.
Thanks Russ for your great leadership and contributions to the Go community. I’ve always enjoy your talks, blogs, and your many contributions to the language. Looking forward to your future contributions to the language and ecosystem.
There are features of the Go toolchain that I consider to be a requirement in all future languages.
For example, if a language doesn't come with a built-in formatter that's a huge red flag. Go broke the tyranny of style discussions.
Easy static binaries is right up there for all new languages.
Kudos to rsc and team for all the work that went into making a great language. Good luck on your next projects.
I have so many disagreements on goals for the language with Russ, but have been a fan since his early days of writing the regex package and the c-to-go conversion code. Glad to hear he will still contribute to the lang, and hoping for a bit different direction from the new leads.
Thank you for making my career more enjoyable and productive, rsc! Go is a lovely ecosystem and I'm looking forward to see where it will Go :).
humor: I wonder if the upvotes are cheerings that he finally stepped down or a respectful salute. I give my respectful salute.
Go is awesome and I hope it will continue to progress in that direction. Thank you Russ Cox
Thanks RSC, since the past 8 years I really enjoyed working with Go. It's my first experience following a programming language development, all the proposals, debates and how all of them were handled.
The Go community is incredibly lucky having had a person as lead with such outstanding technical skills and at the same time a great sense of strategic long term view. As this was not enough, I remember reading some discussions where I thought "Damn, this rsc guy has a lot of patience."
Go evolves slowly but steadily. No drama, no politics (external, I don't know about the internal), not social justice wars, just great technical and community work focussing on the thing at hand: A programming language and ecosystem.
Does Google actually consider Go to be a success? I get the impression that it failed in what it set out to be: a successor to C/C++. Or put differently, Rust has eaten Go‘s lunch.
Go was never intended to be a C/C++ successor, it was intended to solve a class of problems that Pike and gang experienced in the software they worked on. Which is to say network servers. What you are probably remembering is that they assumed from their unique Google lens that it was C++ developers who had those same problems and would see it as an alternative to C++ when faced with those problems, but it turned out that in the "real" world people were writing network servers in Python and Ruby, not C++.
Which isn't surprising to the rest of us. If you remember the days before Go, every second thread on HN was about how "company X", including the company now known as X, saw their Ruby network servers completely falling down under load, forcing a rewrite in whatever the language du-jour was that day. But Googlers tend to live in a completely different bubble with respect to the way software is written.
Well, a lot of servers are Google are (or were) written in Java not C++. As a GCd language, arguably Go competed with Java internally moreso than C++. One of Go's flagship projects (Kubernetes) started out being written in Java for example.
If I remember the legend correctly, the idea for Go was initially conceived while waiting for a C++ program to compile. Not sure about any of the other stuff, but they definitely got the compile times right...
A goal of Go was to put working on complex distributed systems within the reach of the junior people Google had access to in the quantity they were hiring. To whit, the kind of people who would have been able to work on a big Python system with 3 months ramp up or on a big C++ system with a year of ramp up.
It is pretty clear that with respect to that goal, Go is a success. It has attracted Python programmers who need type safety and performance. Someone with no Go experience could land a useful new feature in a big Go program in 3 months.
Introducing a junior person to a large Rust system would still take a year, because it is so much more difficult than Go. Which means to me that if Rust had been aiming at this same adoption goal (it wasn't) it would not have succeeded where Go did.
> "Introducing a junior person to a large Rust system would still take a year, because it is so much more difficult than Go."
A recent study done at Google disagrees with this assessment.
""it takes about the same sized team about the same time to build it, so that's no loss of productivity",
said Google's Director of Engineering Lars Bergstrom about porting Go to Rust in the talk https://youtu.be/6mZRWFQRvmw?t=27012
His direct quote contradicts your assertion:
"When we have rewritten from Go into Rust, we found that it takes the same size of team and same time to build it."
Important part here being: rewrite. I would expect a rewrite to take less time, not the same time, than writing from scratch. Yet a Rust rewrite took as long as Go from-scratch project.
So to me, this implies the opposite, that Rust takes longer to write.
Time to build a new system and time to onboard a new team member without professional experience in a given language are 2 very difficult things.
Go is much more optimised for quick onboarding, fast feedback, more “code look” consistency across projects then rust.
Now a team that knows both rust and go well might have the same proditivity in rust and go (maybe even more in rust), but with lots of changes in personell, specifically in quick growing departments, go can make a huge difference.
This is obviously just an anecdote, but i’ve seen more companies or departments running mostly a go backend stack, having job postings saying “no go experience required”, than the equivalent other companies (or departments ) focused on any other lang.
> Introducing a junior person to a large Rust system would still take a year, because it is so much more difficult than Go.
Do you really think large Golang codebases are so easy to survey? I could see the argument wrt. C++, but Rust actually has a great featureset for programming "in the large". Take a look at the k8s codebase for an example of a large project that's written in Golang - doesn't seem all that easy to get started with.
This is an interesting question, but I doubt you will get a satisfactory answer here and probably anywhere. There is probably not even a uniform opinion about this within Google.
What I am more curious about is how much actual use Go has within companies and especially Google. What is the percentage of Go within their monorepo? How much of Google search is powered by Go?
I guess it depends on how you define success, but given there's a lot of people writing a lot of go code inside and outside of google over the last 15 years it seems likely it's doing a decent job at solving problems for those people. I'd call that a success.
It was not supposed to /universally/ replace C++.
It was supposed to replace C++ in projects where the developers would’ve otherwise reached for C++ simply because it was the default language choice.
One guy that did ML in Google told me that Google indeed tried to use Go for ML problems, then realized it's too slow and went back to C++ there.
thanksStr := "thank you rsc"
ret, err := sayThanks(thanksStr)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
return ret, nilCan anyone familiar with Go explain why not
return sayThanks(thanksStr)
"return ret, nil" ignores err's value, which is nil anyway.
"return nil, err" ignores ret's value, but why? If the caller checks for err before doing anything with ret, it doesn't hurt having ret always passed up.
4 extra lines only to lose the value of ret in case of error.
You can golf it down to
return sayThanks("thank you rsc")
It's a joke about how every contrived Go example posted to the internet is in that vein. You wouldn't blindly pass something up the stack like that in a real application. Well, maybe if you hate other developers for some reason.
In this case, the if err != nil is completely useless.
Usually the pattern is used to perform better error handling (wrapping errors) or in case you call multiple functions that might return an error.
In this case, your suggestion is actually what I would expect to see
It's not needed if it's just on its own, but Go's error handling makes it necessary when chaining functions, which is why you see it so often.
Imagine in Java or Python or C# or ... many languages that use exceptions to handle errors:
return a(b(c(arg)));
cVal, err := c(arg)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
bVal, err := b(cVal)
if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
return a(bVal) // the final call can be simpler
As for why "return nil, err" rather than "return ret, err"? Because while the caller _should_ check for errors, sometimes they just don't.
ret, _ := abc(arg) // just ignore the error
ret.DoSomethingFun()
Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain!
Don't forget the context string so you can "unwind the stack" from the error message:
return nil, fmt.Errorf("expressing gratitude: %w", err)Go has become a very mainstream language, giving software development a new look.
Thanks for your leadership of the Go team over the past 12 years, and for your patient comments and guidance on our proposals and PRs.
Best wishes for the future, and hope to see you in the community again.
Any reference for a website or book that introduce Go for a beginner in depth?
Boy, this makes me sad. He’s really changed my life, I’ve learned so much about software and programming from his writing and thinking. I wish it didn’t have to happen, but I guess it’s only ever a matter of time.
Happy to hear that. Still going to write and think. :-)
I think the only reason I used go at some point was because of Russ Cox. Have joined the dark side and switched to rust ;).
Wonder what he’s going to do next? Maybe just moving around within G? or another OSS project within G?
The post actually contains some references to what he’s working on next, some kind of LLM agent to facilitate software development processes?
Please make more Ivy videos
I think you might be thinking of Rob Pike's project, unless Russ has been involved?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek1yjc9sSag&list=PLrwpzH1_9u...
I don't intend to make more of those, but that was a lot of fun.
Russ has indeed been involved, he's done various videos solving advent of code using Ivy.
Russ has also got a pull request to add an operator, see https://github.com/robpike/ivy/pull/83
Go changed the way I think about concurrency.
Being able to use channels in a modern programming language is such a gift.
rsc thank you for all your contribution to our field. You blog posts also taught me a lot.
Go team has built a remarkable tool under your leadership. A tool that moved a niddle to the better side of things for the industry. Thank you and God speed!
Want to say thanks to anyone and everyone that made Go happen. It’s been my language for a while now and I appreciate what it has made available to me.
Thanks Russ and infinite kudos to you
Thank you, amazing language :)
Russ thank you so very much for your outstanding leadership, dedication, design wisdom, and technical contributions to Go. This language, its libraries and tools, and especially the Go community are incredible. You are a class act sir!
Thanks for working to create such a great language!
Thank you for all your work Russ!
Thank you.
Golang is easily one of my favorite new languages. It's fast and clean without the difficulty of Rust. I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang.
I would like better mobile and gaming frameworks though. Although I really like Flutter, I think Google missed a major opportunity to use Golang instead of Dart.
What's next? Any good for native Chrome support?
>I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang.
>I would like better mobile and gaming frameworks though
er, try asking chatgpt to create them for you.
> I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang.
so you didn't really create it then did you? ChatGpt created it for you.
I'm shameless when using Chat GPT to assist with personal projects.
It's just another tool.
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I'll put it this way, the same doesn't apply with Rust.
I don't feel ashamed that I didn't manually come up with sorting algorithms. I was able to make a small Golang project and I had fun.
Since rsc frequents HN: I’d like to thank you for all the work you’ve put into this great language. Peak HN hype cycle I decided to pick up Go and never regretted it. Thank you.
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Certain people take their job seriously. You can judge that however you want, but they exist.
F
Is the new tech lead more likely to get rid of the glibc-isms that Golang won't let go of, like crashing if non-ELF standard parameters like env aren't passed in ELF library initialization, or maybe supporting global-dynamic thread local storage so we can dlopen() shared objects made in Go on platforms that don't hack like glibc?
Go's obsession with glibc-isms is really unfortunate, and it's been many years. If you're using Go with containers on Alpine/musl, keep your code very vanilla, because they won't support you.
golang's priority is "works inside of google" and everything else tends to be a bit of a fight
This is definitely not true. "Inside of Google" would have been just linux/amd64 for a very long time. Now it includes linux/arm64 too, but that port happened before Google needed it. And all the other ports are not used inside of Google, except maybe the Mac port if you count developers laptops.
Here are some citations since people seem to be just downvoting because they don't like the message:
Go requiring non-ELF standard parameters for initialization of supposedly "C ABI" libraries, open since 2015.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/13492
The Go project specifically acknowledging the glibc-isms here:
"All Linux first class ports are for systems using glibc only. Linux systems using other C libraries are not fully supported and are not treated as first class."
https://go.dev/wiki/PortingPolicy
Go only supporting static-init thread local storage, and thus their "C ABI" libraries can only be dlopen()'ed if the libc pre-allocates memory to hack in libraries later.
If you just want to run Go programs on Alpine, it works fine. (I put some effort in back in Go 1.21 to make sure that the downloaded binary toolchains for Linux even work fine on Alpine.)
If you want to use c-shared mode and dlopen, then yes that only works with glibc, but that mode barely works at all anyway. It's not actively supported at all.
Respectfully, these vague states of support between “active” and less active, “first class” and not first class, etc comes off as “we want to say we have that but shrug any time it’s deficient.”
Its similar to calling the port overall “linux/<cpu-arch>” rather than “linux/<libc>/<cpu-arch>” which wouldn’t normally be called for except when you’re going to embed a bunch of a particular libc specific behavior in your consumption of libc.
Listening to Go advocates talk about C interop like it’s not only a solved problem but quite literally a strength of Go, while Go project leaders represent that support quite differently isn’t it. Perhaps clarification of these level of support terms and how the project embraces glibc specific behaviors unapologetically would help.
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Nomination for RSC's greatest technical contribution: module versioning. Absolutely fundamental to the language ecosystem.
https://research.swtch.com/vgo-intro
Agreed, see the index of those posts: https://research.swtch.com/vgo
Other contenders I find myself sharing and re-reading:
- https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
- https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html
- https://research.swtch.com/bisect
- https://research.swtch.com/zip
The interesting thing is - this went pretty much against the community at the time.
At the time, the community seemed to have settled on dep - a different, more npm-like way of locking dependencies.
rsc said "nope this doesn't work" and made his own, better version. And there was some wailing and gnashing of teeth, but also a lot of rejoicing.
That makes me a bit sad that rsc is leaving.
On the other hand, I don't really like the recent iterator changes, so maybe it's all good.
Btw if you reading this rsc, thanks a lot for everything, go really changed my life (for the better).
Iterators definitely have one of the strangest syntaxes I've seen, but if you promise not to break the language you better not introduce new syntax without a Major reason (like generics, but even those actually introduced next to no new syntax, even re-using interfaces o_O).
That's what he said
Plenty of people in the community considered dep way too messy to be the real solution.
One I enjoyed a lot (a lot) was this one https://research.swtch.com/pcdata
Hope he gives us more in the future
thanks rsc
Fundamentally broken model of versioning, but I guess nobody really cares.
Can you elaborate on what problems you have with the MVS algorithm?
Not really a fan at all. Dep and its predecessors followed kiss principles, were easy to reason about, and had great support for vendoring.
I’ve wasted so much time dealing with “module hell” in go, that I never dealt with in the prior years of go usage. I think it has some major flaws for external (outside Google) usage.
> non-nilness
Ah, I still remember this thread:
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/rvGTZSFU8sY/m/R7El...
Wow, that's painful to read.
Separating the concept of pointers and nullable types is one of the things that I think go having from the beginning would have made it a much better language. Generics and sum types are a couple of others.
False things programmers believe:
All reference types should be able to take a null value.
It's impossible to write complex and performant programs without null.
It's impossible to write complex and performant programs without pointers.
References always hold a memory address in a linear address space. (Not even true in C!)
Every type is comparable.
Every type is printable.
Every type should derive from the same common type.
All primitive types should support all kind of arithmetic the language has operators for.
The only way to extend an existing type is to inherit from it.
What else?
Every type must have some sort of a default value. (A generalization of the first item, really.)
It's going to be much faster to enumerate the true things programmers believe.
Well, looks like the GP missed a very common false fact:
The operations written in a program must literally represent the operations the computer will execute.
This one stops being true on high-level languages at the level of x86 assembly.
It is possible to write complex and performant programs without allocating memory.
And in some languages, where you only operate on values, and never worry about where something is stored, allocation is just an implementation detail.
That's... not true?
Example in C:
void fun(void) {
}I have allocated and referred to memory without pointers here.
> Every type is printable.
It’s 2024, every type is jsonable!
A few of those myths are stated as fact in the aforementioned thread.
> Well, clearly there is a need for a special value that is not part of the set of legal values.
There's a neat trick available here: If you make zero an illegal value for the pointer itself, you can use zero as your "special value" for the std::optional wrapper, and the performance overhead goes away.
This is exactly what Rust does, and as a result, Option<&T>, Option<Box<T>>, etc are guaranteed to have zero overhead: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/index.html#representati...
> If I can dream, all of this would be solved by 72-bit CPUs, which would be the same as 64-bit CPUs, but the upper 8 bits can be used for garbage collection tags, sentinel values, option types etc.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/cheri...
Address space is 64bit, pointers are 128bit, and encode the region the pointer is allowed to dereference. And there's a secret 129th bit that doesn't live in the address space that gets flipped if the pointer is overwritten (unless it's an explicit instruction for changing a pointer)
> Wow, that's painful to read.
And the dismissive tone of some people including Ian. But to be fair before Rust there was definitely this widespread myth in the dev hivemind that nullable pointers is just the cost of performance and low level control. What’s fascinating is how easy and hindsight-obvious it was to rid code of them. I’ve never had to use pointers in Rust and I’ve worked on quite advanced stuff.
Nullable pointers are fine for those who need them. What we're asking for is non-nullable pointers.
> "Go doesn't have nullable types in general. We haven't seen a real desire for them"
Ouch, who were they asking? There are so many problems from even the most simple CRUD apps where "lack of a value" must be modelled, but where the zero-value is a valid value and therefore an unsuitable substitute. This is probably my single biggest pain point with Go.
Using pointers to model nullability, or other "hacks" like using a map where keys may not be set, feel completely at odds with Go's stated goal of high code clarity and its general disdain for trickery.
I know with generics it's now trivially easy to implement your own Optional wrappers, but the fact that it's not part of the language or even the standard library means you're never going to have a universal way of modelling this incredibly basic and common requirement across projects. It also means you're never going to have any compile-time guarantees against not accidentally using an invalid value—though that's also the case with the ubiquitous (value, error) pattern and so is evidently not something the language is concerned with.
Everyone just keeps repeating the same old gripe, without bothering to read the responses.
Go needs a null-like thing because the language forces every type to have a zero value. To remove the concept of zero value from Go would be a major change.
The responses from Ian and the Go fans are not very well-thought.
To begin with, zero values were never a great idea. It sounds better than what C does (undefined behavior), but zero values can also hide subtle bugs. The correct approach is to force values to always be initialized on declaration or make use-before-initialization an error.
Having said that, it was probably too late to fix zero values by 2009, when Go was released to the public, and this is not what the thread's OP suggested. He referred to Eiffel, which is an old language from the 1990s (at least?) that didn't initially have null-safety (or "void-safety" in Eiffel's case), but released a mechanism to do just that in 2009, shortly after Tony Hoare's talk at QCon London 2009 (no idea if they were influenced by the talk, but they did mention the "Billion Dollar Mistake" in the release notes).
Eiffel's added nullability and non-nullability markers to types (called "detachable" and "attached"), but it's also using flow-sensitive typing[1] to prevent null-dereferencing (which is the main cause for bugs).
The thread OP didn't ask to eliminate zero values or nullable types, but rather requested to have a non-nullable pointer type, and flow-sensitive typing.
If structs need to be zero-initialized, a non-nullable pointer could be forbidden in structs, or alternatively Go could make explicit initialization mandatory for structs that have non-nullable pointers. At the very least, Go could support non-nullable pointers as local stack values, and use flow-sensitive typing to prevent null dereference.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-sensitive_typing
What basic properties no longer hold?
Wow, that discussion is infuriating. I'm shocked that many people on there don't seem to understand the difference between compile time checks and runtime checks, or the very basics of type systems.
I think people do understand the basics of static type systems, but disagree about which types are essential in a "system language" (whatever that is).
An integer range is a very basic type, too, conceptually, but many languages don't support them in the type system. You get an unsigned int type if you're lucky.
The semantics are always complex. The same type of question arises for all basic types. For example, what does adding a string to an integer produce?
Or do you give up on answering that and simply prevent adding strings and integers? When one wants to add them they can first manually apply an appropriate type conversion.
That is certainly a valid way to address your question – i.e. don't allow incrementing said type. Force converting it to a type that supports incrementing, and then from that the developer can, if they so choose, convert it back to an appropriate range type, including the original range type if suitable.
Of course, different languages will have different opinions about what is the "right" answer to these questions.
I regularly find quite smart people assume Rust's references must be fat pointers to handle lifetimes, and check them all at runtime.
> An integer range is a very basic type, too, conceptually
Just signed vs unsigned makes this a complex topic.
Many people on here as well! :-) Reading the comments on this post is stepping into an alternative universe from the PL crowd I usually interact with. Very conservative. It's quite interesting.
It's like they don't speak the same languages.
Well written list of what made Go better language during last years. I'd add iterators, the recent big thing from Russ.
Wow. I haven't followed Go for a while, thanks for that note.
Iterators are very nice addition, even with typical Go fashion of quite ugly syntax.
Just last week I've implemented an iterator for my C++ type and lol to your comment. It was fucking nightmare compared to how you (will) implement an iterator in Go.
I didn't study the reason why Go chose this way over others. I do know they've considered other ways of doing it and concluded this one is best, based on complex criteria.
People who make value judgements like this typically ignore those complex consideration, of which playing well with all the past Go design decisions is the most important.
Frankly, you didn't even bother to say which language does it better or provide a concrete example of the supposedly non-ugly alternative.
C#, python - here are the most mainstream examples of syntax that doesn’t look alien.
They don't have any syntax that differs from the previous Go versions.
Iterators and generics go against the original goals of Go - simplicity and productivity. They complicated Go language specification too much without giving back significant benefits. Iterators and generics also encourage writing unnecessarily complicated code, which makes Go less pleasant to work with. I tried explaining this at https://itnext.io/go-evolves-in-the-wrong-direction-7dfda8a1...
This argument is brought up again and again, but it is just wrong.
Go had both generics and iterators from the get go. Just not user defined ones.
Thus it is obvious that the creators of the language always saw their need for a simple and productive language
Not obvious to me. We just implemented a streaming solution using the iterator interfaces. They are just functions so reading the code its easy to understand. Adding special language support only serves to obfuscate the actual code.
tell me, how often do you find yourself writing `interface{}`?
I do agree with his point that the implicit mutation of the loop body for an iterative will be difficult to debug.
I'm not sure I can agree about generics. In many cases Go code is already fast enough, so other things come to play, especially type safety. Prior to generics I often had to write some quite complicated (and buggy) reflection code to do something I wanted (e.g. allow to pass functions that take a struct and return a struct+err to the web URL handlers, which would then get auto-JSONed). Generics allow to write similar code much easier and safer.
Generics also allow to write some data structures that would be useful e.g. to speed up AST parsing: writing a custom allocator that would allocate a large chunk of structs of a certain type previously required to copy this code for each type of AST node, which is a nightmare.
> Prior to generics I often had to write some quite complicated (and buggy) reflection code to do something I wanted (e.g. allow to pass functions that take a struct and return a struct+err to the web URL handlers, which would then get auto-JSONed).
This sounds like a good application for Go interfaces (non-empty interfaces). The majority of generics Go code I've seen could be simplified by using non-empty interfaces without the need of generics.
Totally agree, as far as I know Rob Pike no longer develop Go, that's why. Came corporate people instead who think they do their work, asking community (who said that it should be asked?) what new cocojamba feature should be added (like js)
But what can we do against of this? This what I think: - stuck to use Go 1.16 - fork Go 1.16 and continue develop lang from there - learn OCaml... - give up and consume what these people decide to add to lang next and everytime feel disgust
I’m sure if Go had nullable types and/or sum types from the beginning, it’s have been much more popular
It's already quite popular. I'm less convinced there's a large pile of people wishing for a fairly high performance garbage collected language that are not using Go because of this. There just aren't many viable alternatives.
Java and C# being the obvious (and more performant) alternatives. And compared to them, Go already wins because of not being, well, "enterprisey". And with that I mean less the languages itself, but also the whole ecosystem around them.
For the 3 people who actually need Kubernetes.
There are definitely lots, I'm one of them. I use Scala, which is very powerful and imho much nicer language than golang. But the tooling and other support is slow and subpar. But I just can't go back to a brain-dead language(!) like golang because it hurts to program in such languages to me. So I hope that either golang catches up with Scala's features, or that Scala catches up with golangs tooling.
And I think there are many similar people like me.
I guess we have different opinions. Maybe you had some bad experiences in the past? Scala 3 is very different from Scala 2 many years ago
There are few languages that are safer and easier to maintain, imho. The typesafety is superb.
I'm sure of the opposite given the ideas behind Go's design.
Perhaps, but other languages that look a lot like Go with these additions (e.g. OCaml) have not gained much popularity, despite getting much more love on forums like HN. It's important to remember that the people expressing strong opinions about sum types on the internet are a tiny and non-representative fraction of working programmers.
OCaml has a huge number of challenges besides "popular language plus sum types"
Go has nullable types! We want non-nullable types!
I blame C# for the confusion. Think of it this way: the ability to explicitly express a type Foo|null implies the existence of a non-nullable Foo as well. IOW it’s shorthand for “nullable and non-nullable types”.
Don't forget that the semantic change of traditional 3-clause "for" loops: https://go101.org/blog/2024-03-01-for-loop-semantic-changes-...
Because of this change, Go 1.22 is actually the first Go version which seriously breaks Go 1 compatibility, even if the Go official doesn't admit the fact.
> since Go 1.22, every freshly-declared loop variable used in a for loop will be instantiated as a distinctive instance at the start of each iteration. In other words, it is per-iteration scoped now. So the values of the i and v loop variables used in the two new created goroutines are 1 2 and 3 4, respectively. (1+2) + (3+4) gives 10.
I think you are assuming more guarantees than are actually guaranteed.
You have a well-documented history of making incorrect claims about Go compiler and runtime behaviors, so this isn't surprising.
> since Go 1.22, you should try to specify a Go language version for every Go source file
What on Earth?? Absolutely 100% not.
:D
It looks you don't understand the change at all.
The statement "since Go 1.22, you should try to specify a Go language version for every Go source file" is made officially, not by me.
> You have a well-documented history of making incorrect claims about Go compiler and runtime behaviors, so this isn't surprising.
The claim is totally baseless.
All my opinions and articles are based on facts. If you have found ones which are incorrect or which are not based on facts, please let me know: https://x.com/zigo_101.
I think it is best to let rsc answer your questions. :D
Are there cases where people actually rely on the previous behavior?
I always assumed that it was considered faulty to do so.
There were certainly buggy tests that relied on the old behavior. We didn't find any actual code that relied _correctly_ on the old behavior.
https://go.dev/wiki/LoopvarExperiment
The tests are in the simplest forms, there are more complex use cases of traditional "for" loops. The complex cases are never explored by the authors of the change.
And there are a large quantity of private Go code in the world.
No convincing evidences to prove there are not such cases. In my honest opinion, if there are such cases in theory, there will be ones in practice. It is a bad expectation to hope such cases never happen in practice.
The authors of the change did try to prove such cases don't happen in practice, but their proving process is totally breaking.
It is my prediction that multiple instances of broken cases will be uncovered in coming years, in addition to the new foot-gun issues created by the altered semantics of transitional 'for' loops.
I wish they would opt for ARC instead of a GC, to have a more deterministic memory objects lifecycle.
Other than that, I agree with your comment.