Re:Why I Don't Like Golang (2016)
by bluquark on Wednesday June 12, 2019 @06:02PM
(#20169799)
Kotlin and Swift are both currently encroaching on Go's server-side use cases. For example, Go's star feature, goroutines, has recently been cloned by Kotlin. They are at least as equally pleasant to program in, and they're hitched to major client platforms which means they improve faster and will definitely have a pool of trained developers in the long term.
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Java is getting a fiber implementation by means of project Loom, which will make golang even less appealing. The good thing is that because the fiber implementation will be built into the JVM, Kotlin and other languages can use them seamlessly.
Points taken. I am full time on Go since few years ago and before that I was 100% Java. Haven't really kept myself up-to-date with the Java land.
But from my experience with Java, Go, and Python, I find Go a very versatile programming language. Being able to compile binaries means it's great for infrastructure deployments and CLI tools. Goroutines, concurrency, and etc make it a great choice for server/micro service use cases as well. Some can say that not having a JVM is a plus as well.
However, developers do have to be disciplined with error handling and dependency management. But one can argue that this is the case for software development in general.
JVM is gaining self-contained deployable package support, and as of recently, Kotlin supports a mode with LLVM-based native code generation.
IMO, the fundamental advantages of Go over competing languages in the long run are its fast compile time and its combination of native code+garbage collection.