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A comment on Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang. Parent comment

Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by innagadadavida on Friday April 29, 2022 @10:33AM (#31205683)
A couple of things to add to this: the language spec is like a page long and very readable. Also the entire compiler toolchain and everything is written in Go and doesn’t depend llvm etc. This doesn’t help the developer but is a pretty unique aspect of Go.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by atombender on Friday April 29, 2022 @12:16PM (#31207117)
The language spec (https://go.dev/ref/spec) is about 96 pages when printed on A4 paper. Certainly not a page long.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by josephcsible on Friday April 29, 2022 @10:44AM (#31205830)
If a language spec is only a page long, it's leaving a bunch of important things unspecified.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by metadat on Friday April 29, 2022 @11:16AM (#31206222)
Can you clarify further? Otherwise this seems like a shallow dismissal, which is against our HN community guidelines, and makes for uninteresting discussion.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by alice-i-cecile on Friday April 29, 2022 @11:24AM (#31206339)
Programming languages have a large amount of irreducible complexity. A page long spec for a language more complex than Brainfuck cannot represent the critical distinctions correctly.

Without that clarity, you end up with incompatible, spec-compliant implementations. This is a disaster, and so below a certain point relative to language complexity a shorter spec is simply wrong.

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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Friday April 29, 2022 @11:42AM (#31206584)
> Without that clarity, you end up with incompatible, spec-compliant implementations.

The Go team officially maintains two implementations, gc and gccgo, to ensure that implementation doesn't end up ruling over the specification as has happened in other languages. There are also other third party implementations, including tinygo.

Which spec-induced incompatibilities across these implementations are you referring to?

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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by oxnrtr on Sunday May 01, 2022 @10:20AM (#31225211)
Go doesn't have a one-page spec, so what do you expect the GP to point to? You are proving his point.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Sunday May 01, 2022 @03:09PM (#31227747)
Looks like one page to me: https://go.dev/ref/spec
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by oxnrtr on Sunday May 01, 2022 @08:56PM (#31230273)
Yeah, no.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Monday May 02, 2022 @09:51AM (#31235107)
Feel free to show us the second page.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by josephcsible on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @01:44AM (#31245057)
It starts about 2/3 of the way through the table of contents.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @12:12PM (#31250044)
A link is fine.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by josephcsible on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @08:51PM (#31255535)
https://go.dev/ref/spec#:~:text=Declarations%20and%20scope-,...
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @08:22AM (#31259462)
That points to the same page.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by josephcsible on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @06:23PM (#31266643)
It's now become abundantly clear to everyone that you're using a different definition of "page" than everyone else in this conversation.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @08:28PM (#31267791)
The only other person in this conversation is you, so not exactly the most representative of samples, but it is an interesting perspective. I've not heard anyone else consider the same HTML resource to be more than one page before. In fact, the term "single page application" hinges on a single HTML resource in the same way. The application may have more than one screen of content, but it is still considered one page.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by josephcsible on Thursday May 05, 2022 @02:34AM (#31270271)
oxnrtr is in this conversation too. And when describing the length of a document, "pages" universally means the number of printed pages it would occupy, not the number of computer files it's stored in.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Thursday May 05, 2022 @08:02AM (#31272246)
There is no sign of anyone else participating in this conversation. Else we'd have heard their input by now. A page referring to a single HTML resource is standard nomenclature. Paper is antiquated technology, not how the Go specification is distributed, and carries no relevance to this discussion.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by oxnrtr on Sunday May 08, 2022 @11:23AM (#31304877)
I hope you receive the help you need and deserve.
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by metadat on Friday April 29, 2022 @11:30AM (#31206423)
Are there nasty divergences between official go and cgo?
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by josephcsible on Friday April 29, 2022 @11:59AM (#31206854)
As it turns out, Go's spec is 105 pages long, not just one as was claimed upthread: https://go.dev/ref/spec

So the answer to your question is "not that I know of", but that's not evidence that a one-page spec is workable after all.

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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by hajile on Friday April 29, 2022 @01:30PM (#31208221)
Can you describe a coherent and consistent multithreaded model completely in 100 pages?
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by metadat on Friday April 29, 2022 @12:05PM (#31206953)
Thank you for showing us the light, jospehcsible!
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Re:Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang by randomdata on Friday April 29, 2022 @10:39AM (#31205756)
> Also the entire compiler toolchain and everything is written in Go and doesn’t depend llvm etc.

Depends on which implementation you're talking about. One of the stated goals of the Go project is that there must not be just one implementation. gc does not, but tinygo depends on llvm. gccgo depends on gcc.

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