Go

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Revision as of 15:23, 21 September 2018

Go is a programming language developed by Google. When it was introduced in 2009, it was promoted as:

• statically typed
• compiled language in the tradition of C
• with memory safety
• and garbage collection
• and structural typing
• and CSP-style concurrency

it became more known with the rise of popularity of docker (as most of the docker ecosystem is written in Go).

Forget Go!

The above is probably all you need to know about Go. Because this post isn't here to promote Go, the post is written to explain that you don't need Go at all. That there are better, faster, more approachable, more toolable alternative language. If you are a happy Go user, stick to it, but if you are considering to use Go for development of a new system, then the main take away is: **Forget Go!**, there are better options.

Let's start by enumerating what are the problems with the Go language.

Slow

Go is slow. The same algorithm written in Go runs at least twice as slow than the same algorithm written in Java or C. I have created a project to measure Turing Speed of various programming languages on a variant of Ancient and well known Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm.

Hard for Coding

Support in IDEs is really bad. TBD. Not an industry standard.

Proprietary

TBD: whole stack is written from scratch and it shows.

[Go], Java [go]!

This is not to say everything in bad in Go. If you are working in an ecosystem that is build with Go (e.g. you are coding against Docker APIs or your are a Google employee), it may still be beneficial to use Go. But otherwise, let's consider Java!

Java!? That slow, interpreted language which eats enormous amount of memory to execute its virtual machine and feels like an operating system on its own? That Java which every real OS level hacker hates? Yes, that one. Well, not exactly that Java, but rather a SubstrateVM.

If you have a pre-occupation against Java forget them. We'll use the best of Java (or any other JVM language like Kotlin) and combine them with SubstrateVM to form a system which is clearly way better than anything Go can provide.