Re:What's Coming in Go 1.15
by jfkebwjsbx on Thursday May 14, 2020 @06:42PM
(#23186485)
> c++ (with about 2000 lines of meson or cmake or makefile, ...)
Making an static binary in C/C++ is a single command-line parameter in most compilers.
Re:What's Coming in Go 1.15
by zaphirplane on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @04:51AM
(#23164896)
What’s the actual quote ?
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike 1"
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike 2"
Sources:
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Lang-NEXT/Lang-NEXT-2014/Pa...
The irony here is that Go type system is weaker than any of those three languages on their latest versions.
So while they learned Java, Python, JavaScript, according to Pike they are still not good enough at their skills, so they must downgrade to Go.
The comparison isn't other compiled languages that can easily produce static binaries (like ghc/haskell, rust, c++ (with about 2000 lines of meson or cmake or makefile, ...), etc).
The comparison is other languages Go programmers might use, like python and javascript. If someone cared about having a good type system, they wouldn't be using Go, so we have to compare Go's capabilities to other languages that are targeted at people who don't want any brilliance or type-theory, but just want a "simple language" where it's accepted as part of the "programmer condition" that you write bad code and get things done.
However, in reality, it's worth pointing out that there are very few other languages that have as seamless a static linking experience as Go. Sure, it's quite possible to statically link C(++), rust, etc, but it's more involved than it is for go. Furthermore, for those languages, there's a larger library ecosystem that dynamically depends on C libraries, so i.e. in rust you may have trouble linking any crate that depends on openssl (which quite a few do transitively). Go is the only language I know of that's created an entire culture of eschewing the C ABI as much as possible, that uses linux's syscall interface even though that means there are various things that are just plain broken (like nsswitch).
So yeah, while it's true that go isn't the only language that can be statically linked, it's one of the few that focuses on it to such an (arguably unhealthy) extreme.