I write a lot of code in golang, and if anything, my views before using the language were even further cemented by even more flaws I found while using it.

Out of curiosity, would you share those flaws you have found?

This is by no means a comprehensive list:

* 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.

Thanks for the writing. I had noticed some of the things you wrote but not all (I am not a Go programmer though I keep track of what is happening there). Your post made me look a bit more into 'defer'. I did not expect it to be a source of errors.

No problem. As a side note, the Zig language does a much better job here, especially with defer. It works at the scope level (how it's supposed to be), and they have an `errdefer` construct used to call functions that return errors.

> no incremental compilation

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?

The problem that I've ran into with the lack of cyclic imports is that I like to arrange the contents of packages logically. However sometimes in order to do this it would result in a circular dependency between two packages. So rather then getting a logical arrangement we have to refactor it into an artificial package to resolve this depenancy.

Circular imports are always a design error, no "logical" to it.

I will hopefully later today, not able to type much now.

>These two issues are usually brought up by people who haven't written a lot of C.

>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.

I have written a lot of Go (hundreds of thousands of LOC), and appreciate Go's approach to both of these. I disagree that these are major issues.

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.

>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.

"I have written a lot of Go (hundreds of thousands of LOC)..."

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?

There's probably a very big difference between "industry standard" and working with a new language at a startup where a lot of things are written from scratch in a short amount of time. 50 lines of code on average for a year won't get you very far if you work on greenfield project.

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.

"There's probably a very big difference between" - that is precisely my point.

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 necessitates so much handrolling. Loops, concurrency patterns, resource management. You can't abstract over much, so you end up doing these things by hand constantly. Therefore you rely on brainpower, ad hoc linters (if one exists), and tests to not blow things up.

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.

As an individual, many of Go's benefits aren't as useful. It's optimized for team settings, emphasizing consistency, readability, explictness, and low cognitive overhead, which are all major weaknesses of Haskell, and major reasons it's not widely used in industry.

For many applications, Go has higher cognitive overhead than Haskell. Modulo learning Haskell of course, but still.

Go is made to treat people as Resources. Full stop. That explains everything about it's benefits.

In some circles C has a better reputation than C++.

Surely you see that other people value other things than you do?

If you value simplicity check out the programming language zig.

https://ziglang.org/

>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.

https://fatiherikli.github.io/brainfuck-visualizer/

I love C, loathe C++, but it is still valid issue that polymorphism in C is hard and error handling rely on convention ? (I know of Zig, Nim et al, I'm more oriented towards Rust this last year)

Status quo is good because it's status quo, sure.