Re:Go: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong
by pjmlp on Friday January 05, 2024 @03:01AM
(#38876819)
> Systems software are either operating systems or OS-adjacent software such as device drivers, debuggers, hypervisors or even complex beasts like a web browser. The closest software that Go can claim in this category is Docker, but Docker itself is just a complex wrapper around Linux kernel features such as namespaces and cgroups. The actual containerization is done by these features which are implemented in C.
Android GPU debugger, USB Armory bare metal unikernel firmware, Go compiler, Go linker, bare metal on maker boards like Arduino and ESP32
> Popular static languages like Java and C# were also inconvenient, but in a different way. Both of these languages were fully capable of writing high-performance servers, but they were not properly tuned for this use case by default. The common frameworks of the day (Spring, Java EE and ASP.net) introduced copious amounts of overhead, and the GC was optimized for high throughput, but it had very bad tail latency (GC pauses) and generally required large heap sizes to be efficient. Dependency management, build and deployment was also an afterthought. Java had Maven and Ivy and .Net had NuGet (in 2010) and MSBuild, but these where quite cumbersome to use. Deployment was quite messy, with different packaging methods (multiple JAR files with classpath, WAR files, EAR files) and making sure the runtime on the server is compatible with your application. Most enthusiasts and many startups just gave up on Java entirely.
Usually a problem only for those that refuse to actually learn about Java and .NET ecosystems.
Still doing great after 25 years, now being copied with the VC ideas to sponsor Kubernetes + WASM selling startups.
Android GPU debugger, USB Armory bare metal unikernel firmware, Go compiler, Go linker, bare metal on maker boards like Arduino and ESP32
> Popular static languages like Java and C# were also inconvenient, but in a different way. Both of these languages were fully capable of writing high-performance servers, but they were not properly tuned for this use case by default. The common frameworks of the day (Spring, Java EE and ASP.net) introduced copious amounts of overhead, and the GC was optimized for high throughput, but it had very bad tail latency (GC pauses) and generally required large heap sizes to be efficient. Dependency management, build and deployment was also an afterthought. Java had Maven and Ivy and .Net had NuGet (in 2010) and MSBuild, but these where quite cumbersome to use. Deployment was quite messy, with different packaging methods (multiple JAR files with classpath, WAR files, EAR files) and making sure the runtime on the server is compatible with your application. Most enthusiasts and many startups just gave up on Java entirely.
Usually a problem only for those that refuse to actually learn about Java and .NET ecosystems.
Still doing great after 25 years, now being copied with the VC ideas to sponsor Kubernetes + WASM selling startups.