> lack of decent error handling (if err !=nil { return nil,err} )
Errors are in your face, instead of having exceptions performing invisible gotos to somewhere far up in call tree. Implicit error handling is more code, but your error handling is going to be much more robust.
> or lack of decent polymorphism...
Lack of polymorphism also means you don't have to guess about concrete types when reading code. When troubleshooting, you can see what's going on without going through whole inheritance tree.
Go encourages composition instead of inheritance. That's something I wish more C++ codebases would do as well. Composition makes code inherently more maintainable and easier to refactor.
Go tends to be easy to read and maintain. It does come with some cost. It's just a matter where your priorities lie. Software projects spend majority of their life as legacy, something that needs to be maintained.
Errors as values is a great idea. Errors as values without sum types or pattern matching, though, gives you twice the tedium and a tenth of the benefit, so once again Golang's slavish adherence to "worse is better" really just makes things...worse. The real problem here, though, is that those invisible gotos still exist: because of how limited Go's type system is, it's very easy to cause a panic with e.g. a nil pointer. Of course, the answer is to rigorously check the cases where a pointer could be nillable, but that trivially contradicts the idea that, when reading Go code, you can feel confident reasoning locally about its resilience if it handles all potential error values appropriately. IMO, this false sense of safety is even worse than just making exceptions first class citizens of the language, and it belies the notion that Go is especially maintainable.
The cost of simpler tools is you need to target better, simpler designs and refactor. This requires more from programmers but produces better code.
My understanding of composition comes from interfaces in C#. In my experience composition is actually more difficult to code and refactor, because it leads to bloat from repeated code as you cannot simply inherit. Refactoring then can become tedious as you may need to manually edit every repeated code block. Whereas with inheritance I define a function once and override it where necessary.
Am I misunderstanding something?
Over time your whole inheritance model often turns out to be no longer viable, when the basic assumptions made years ago are no longer valid.
Worse, because of all of the accumulated cruft, you might not even be able to change the shape of the monster.
So you can get some of the conveniences of inheritance. The behaviour is of course different, because the composed member has no way of knowing the identity of the including struct.
Parametric polymorphism would mean you never have to even consider the type of the code. It's a freeing abstraction with plenty of very simple reference implementations. And it lends itself to composition over inheritance.
And sadly I doubt Go will ever manage to get it.
In day to day work it's really not an issue.
* no generics
* null pointers
* no compile time checked enums or sum types
* The golang time package is garbage
* golang interfaces are garbage, can't tag types with an interface without implementing a dummy method and hope that no other type implements it. Can't find what interfaces a type implements without an IDE
* profiling and debugging tools are nothing in front of JVM and .NET tools
* no const/immutablility
* no ternary operator, need to write 6 lines instead of a single line if it existed
* error handling is error prone and verbose
* no default method implementation in interfaces
* unit testing frameworks are sucky and rely on code gen, can't mock arbitrary types, but only by defining an interface
* that unnused variables and imports are compile time errors, makes it very annoying and time consuming to prototype or when debugging
* no private/public/etc modifier. if you want to change the visibility of a type, you need to rename it in all files it's listed in
* no incremental compilation (yes Java compiles faster in large projects where I only modify a handful of files, or even more)
* pervasive use of single letter identifiers in golang code bases
* pervasive use of int, which has a platform dependent size
* pervasive instantiation of structs by calling them structFoo { Field1: field1, Field2: field2, ... FieldN: fieldN }, which makes it easy to miss when a new field gets added. Rust and Zig solve this by making it required to specify all fields and values.
* defer works on the function scope, not the current scope
* defer doesn't handle functions that return errors, meaning many errors are missed
* no struct or file private, only package private
* the global scope is polluted with special functions like len, copy, delete, make, new, append, for no good reason
* golang imports don't support cyclic imports
* golang doesn't allow you to import a a specific function or struct from a package. You have you always qualify anything with the package name, which makes things verbose and awkward.
Not true, unless you're using an esoteric definition of "incremental".
> imports don't support cyclic imports
Why on earth would you consider this bad?
>In day to day work it's really not an issue.
Polymorphism and error handling, these are issues, address them. Go's a fine language, but don't dismiss actual real issues that have been addressed in other languages for 40+? years.
A bigger issue, IMO, is that people coming to Go from other languages expect it to have similar features to what they're used to. Go is small and conceptually simple, but its ideas and philosophy are pretty different from most mainstream languages.
No, they aren't. They are the same as languages from 40 years ago: We have had channels, coroutines, and good garbage collectors from long, long ago. Plus the syntax is directly borrowed from Algol 68 (from 1968).
Go looks nice because it fills a niche (a high performance garbage collected language that is easier to learn than Java and provides faster compilation times than C++), but there's absolutely nothing different here.
For "pretty different from mainstream" see Forth, Prolog, Erlang, etc.
Go only appeared about 10 years ago. The industry standard is 50 lines of production code a day. 50/day * 250 working days a year = 12.5k loc/year. So it would take you how many continuous years to write 200k LOC?
The industry standard is probably very heavily biased by big corporate code bases where refactoring / architecture takes a lot more time than implementing the actual changes afterwards. Doesn't seem like a very useful calculation you are trying to do there to proof the previous poster wrong.
I have a lot of time playing ms flight sim and so obviously I know how to design airplanes is his argument.
Writing "greenfield" applications that no one (comparatively) is using is relatively easy. Creating systems that have four+ 9's availability, integrate with various disparate APIs, don't lose data, and,and etc is where, IMO, the learning is.
Once one has this experience, watching this micro services "movement" is, in my mind, related to global warming - like watching someone jump out of a plane with no parachute, smiling.
Go has its benefits and reasons to use it (especially the network effects around it). But when it comes to the three things I mention, Go is truly pathetic compared to a language like Haskell. It's amazing how much effort is wasted on those activities. I can see why a corporation would not care, but as an engineer I can do better with my time and effort for my personally-owned endeavors.
Go is made to treat people as Resources. Full stop. That explains everything about it's benefits.
Surely you see that other people value other things than you do?
If you value simplicity check out the programming language zig.
I value simplicity, that's what i use Brainfuck. Far simpler than Go and Zig.
I think this was why Python was able to overtake Perl, for example.
Golang is probably a step up from Python, but it's just that. There are a lot of issues with Golang. From the top of my head, lack of decent error handling (if err !=nil { return nil,err} ) or lack of decent polymorphism are the most annoying. There's a github repo dedicated to what's bugging people: