I agree with most of your post, but I’m not sure I would describe Go as “forgiving”. In fact, it’s well known for being strict. For example, exploratory programming would be significantly easier if the Go compiler could (optionally) ignore unused variables and unreachable code.
I’ve also found exploratory programming in Go is hindered by needing to frequently cast between different integer types. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but my Go code is often littered with casts between different integer sizes and signedness. It’s much easier with Python’s arbitrary-precision integers.
I use it as my daily driver for go development.
main.go:
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
var start int = 1
breakOuter:
// for x := start; x < 10; x++ {
for x := 3; x < 10; x++ {
for y := 0; y < 10; y++ {
result := y * 10 + x
// fmt.Printf("Result: %d\n", result)
// if result == 42 {
// fmt.Printf("Breaking")
// break breakOuter
// }
}
}
}
$ go build
# example
./main.go:3:8: imported and not used: "fmt"
./main.go:8:5: label breakOuter defined and not used
(compilation fails)
$ go build -gcflags=-warnunused
# example
./main.go:8:5: Warning: label breakOuter defined and not used
./main.go:3:8: Warning: imported and not used: "fmt"
./main.go:6:9: Warning: start declared and not used
./main.go:12:13: Warning: result declared and not used
(compilation succeeds)Personally, I feel you with respect to casting integer types. I'll code away with int's until something suddenly needs an int64 to use a package and I have to cast everything or refactor everything to int64. I once commented in a thread where people were asked, "In hindsight what feature would you like in Go?" I said that int should just be an alias for int64 (and float == float64), since these were the defaults in the stdlib. I was downvoted into oblivion in a thread on hypotheticals. I understand the historical machine dependent 32/64 difference, but since the stdlib made a choice, the default should line up nicely. That said, I mostly run into this in Project Euler problems, so not in my day to day work.
As long as my execution path doesn't hit any code containing errors, I can run debug and even modify code in the debugger.
That's exploratory programming.
I haven't been able to get IntilliJ to run broken code, which is one of the main reasons I stay with eclipse at least part of the time.
It can actually be a feature, and one of the things that brought me to go, as you can define your own integer (or float, or string, etc.) types, thus making them incompatible with each other:
type distance int
type speed int
func distFor(d distance, t time.Time) speed { ... }
...
x = distFor(x, t) // Oops, that's probably a bug!
As mentioned in the docs, you can use the Deref facility to have the newtype implement everything that the original type does. Rust just gives you the choice of doing this vs. wrapping with a custom set of impls.
However, as the OP of this thread, I have to admit that I often feel conflicted about it. Using the Deref trait certainly feels like another hack (and some people really dislike it). Basically Deref is what's used to dereference a reference. It's invoked automatically when you are calling a trait function on a variable. So if you have a variable that's a struct that implements a trait, it will bind to the function on that trait. If your variable contains a reference to the struct, then the compiler is smart enough to see if the struct implements the trait and then automatically uses the Deref train to derefernce the reference and bind to the function.
So if you want to delegate from one type to exactly one other type, you can do it simply by implementing the Deref trait on the first type and having it convert to the second type. It's kind of elegant, but also kind of hacky :-) There are people who feel that Deref should only be used for objects that are actually memory references. Other people feel that it's OK to use it when one type is masquerading as another type (as we are doing when we put a data structure inside a tuple to make it a "new type").
On the plus side, it gives you really fine grained control without adding new constructs to the language. You can make a "new type" that incurs no runtime overhead (in speed or space) and you can choose whether to delegate all of the function calls to the contained type, or to control them explicitly. The former is really, really easy (essentially 5 lines of boilerplate) and the latter is extremely easy to read and reason about. I have to admit that it's hard to justify adding a new construct for something that is not actually broken (except when you first look at it ;-) ).
And, really, to me this is Rust in a nutshell. It's got a lot of really elegant and intelligent decisions going into its implementation, but all of them look incredibly unlikely when you first look at them. The result is that the learning curve is quite high and the road to fluency long. Often newbies (which I probably still qualify for) ask, "Why the heck is it done this way". When you get the answer, it make sense, but it's often not as satisfying as you had initially hoped :-) Still, like others who push past that point, I've got to say that I really enjoy writing Rust code. It's strange.
Single binary is also another one that really shouldn't matter to me, but still does. Especially for small utilities or web services, it's just really nice to know that I can `scp` to my server and just run it if I wanted to, even though, in reality, I always use a Docker container.
But CLIs don't usually need that. They can be ctrl-C'd if they go off the rails, and any dangling goroutines just die when the process dies. The simple distribution, fast startup, simple type system, and yolo-concurrency really pay off in pleasantly small and performant tools. And the stdlib is cross platform, quite capable, and very friendly to use. It's almost exactly what you want when you need to go beyond a tiny bash script, to something that might be a up to a couple thousand lines.
I do wish the built-in flags lib wasn't so abhorrent though. Pulling in a replacement lib is step 1 for any CLI.
This comment does not really makes sense, Go #1 usage is for backend services, so it's indeed long running / stable program.
"They can be ctrl-C'd if they go off the rails, and any dangling goroutines just die when the process dies"
There are solution in Go to handle that case, using context and channel but ultimatly it's not a Go problem if you kill an app right away usually there is no way to clean-up everything in a clean way.
Of course there are ways to achieve both in any language, but the massive educational pressure of the official docs and tutorials and examples cannot be ignored, and has profound impacts on what the community ends up building in the language.
---
It's roughly equivalent to manual memory management, IMO. Terabytes have been spilled claiming that C is safe if you're careful enough or use safe patterns, and CVE after CVE provides evidence that nobody is sufficiently careful. It has its benefits, but it also has its downsides.
Oh? Building long-running microservices is literally my main use of Go, and in my opinion the language excels at it. What sort of issues are you having?
Everytime I deploy some Python3.7 Flask Application on RHEL7 I start to scream.
You were talking about long running applications and broken goroutines: What is the best alternative? I liked to stumble around in Elixir but I feel bad about deploying some application probably nobody at my office will ever be able to 'fix/update'. Python feels too "sluggish". Since I am no Python Pro I have often the feeling, that I am doing something wrong because the language doesn't show any borders.
Beyond that, dunno - I usually reach for Python since I've written it professionally for a few years and it's pleasantly terse. But it's a fair bit of work to make actually fast and I don't generally think it's worth that effort. Go is much easier there... as long as it's kept simple.
I have some strong hope for Rust, but I think it's fair to label it as "still maturing", though it's already very far of ahead many langs in some areas. And I just don't have much experience with it yet, so have no real conclusions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They're working on it, for example: https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/310
# time ./hellogo
hello world
real 0m0.005s
user 0m0.001s
sys 0m0.005s
of course one needs to understand how go routines work in order to use them correctly, but thats probably true for everything, right?
golang's gc is non-compacting. I wouldn't be surprised if there are cases where fragmentation becomes too much for a golang service to continue behaving properly. This becomes more likely in long running services.
Generally if you just stick to fan-out-in processing though I find goroutines not too bad.
https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/peterbourgon/ff/v3/ffcli is one that I've been using recently, which has been a lot nicer.
It's reasonably fast, compiles down to a simple to distribute binary, and the language is forgiving enough that you can do exploratory programming in it. Go-routines make it especially easy to deal with network calls in it as well. For anything that needs absolute performance though look elsewhere, but even then Go might be a good choice for prototyping.
I actually started learning Go with CLI applications. I have found that https://github.com/spf13/cobra tends to be one of the better CLI helpers you can get into but https://github.com/jpillora/opts is one I have been meaning to try following a presentation I saw on it once.