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Comment by bipin_nag | Hacker News Reader

Javascript would be the assembly language of web i.e. what runs on your browser. Although that won't be true with the advent of Webassembly. Go is language of choice on cloud.

If you ask me following is the checklist it passes:

1. Low memory footprint/good GC

2. Concurrency (goroutines) builtin

3. Great dependency (package) management

4. Compiled/closer to bare metal

5. Fast compilation

If you check other languages against the list they lack at least one of the above. If you feel any other language is better suited please tell.

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> Go is language of choice on cloud.

I don't think this makes any sense. Javascript is the assembly language of the web because it's the only choice for the web (or more specifically, the browser). At best, any other legitimate choice will just compile to JavaScript, which is why it's thusly named. Go has no such privileged position; it's not even clear what it would mean to be the "language of choice on the cloud." You can write cloud software in any language you want, provided that the language has libraries for networking. All of the features you list are great, but none of them are exclusive to Go, nor are they required for cloud computing.

I agree that that the statements cannot be analogues. But then I never implied it. My answer was only to counter the statement that JavaScript is the assembly language, in future WebAssembly will likely take that role. Then I continued on my intended answer of why Go is the preferred language.

> 3. Great dependency (package) management

Eh... Then why are people experimenting with vendoring?

> If you check other languages against the list they lack at least one of the above. If you feel any other language is better suited please tell.

Ocaml checks all of them. So does Haskell (with stack package manager), with only the low memory requirement being challengeable since many aren't used to optimizing lazy evaluation.

Both languages you suggest require more learning (both have origins in academia) and are less popular compared to Go in usage.

Regarding the package management comment. If it is an experiment let results get in. Some people consider vendoring bad yet others find some use in it. If vendoring happens like it or not it wont make dependency management bad as a whole.

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