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Comment by coldcode | Hacker News Reader

I for one will be more interested in using Go when Jetbrains finishes their IDE. Clearly not everyone cares to develop in an IDE but after 33 years of doing it, I prefer the idea. Give Swift (my current work) as many years as Go has had (10 years), and maybe I won't find Go that interesting any more.

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To each their own, but Go is probably the only mainstream language that has first class integration with text editors. So I wouldn't let that stop me from using it, unless you can't see yourself using a text editor at all.

What is the first class integration? My experience using Ruby, Python and Rust (via Racer) with Vim+Syntastic has been pretty good.

IDE functionality, similar to what godef/guru for Golang offer. But I'd settle on any mostly working jump-to-definition tool for Ruby/Python/Java that can be integrated with Vim/Emacs.

In Emacs Elpy has served me pretty well for python.

In my Emacs I've got 1) eldoc (displaying signature of function at point), 2) function source lookup, 3) function documentation lookup, 4) flycheck (display compiler err/warn on save), 5) auto-completion. Among a few other things like go-guru integration which I haven't used much yet but I can see its use.

All of those features come from editor agnostic golang tools.

Typescript has thee same. Ditto with C#. Python is pretty close. Same with most LISPs.

In Emacs too. I'd hardly say this is a unique selling point of Go.

Do they do static analysis of code? The problem is that with other languages they all work "sort of". For example, for Elpy:

"the backends can not always identify what kind of symbol is at point. Especially after a few indirections, they have basically no hope of guessing right, so they don’t"

With go guru it just works, always, no matter how deep you drill into the graph (that's what I meant by "first class").

With C# and TypeScript and all LISPs I've worked with, they work hand in hand with the compiler/runtime to provide absolute correctness at all levels. Absolutely first class. (And I agree Elpy does not qualify for that term)

And while we're on the subject: Only Microsoft had the foresight (or hindsight, insight, whatever) to realize this was a general problem and propose a solution which applies to all editors and all languages:

https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol

https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/wiki/P...

You'd think Google, with their tons of resources could put together a few resources and join a new, future-proof non-NIH standard for Go, but so far they seems to be lagging.

I agree, a common standard would be good. That said, experience taught me to distrust any proposed standard that comes out of Microsoft. Besides, I find that with the programming editor communities, such standards are not that important - as long as a language has the tooling, it'll be integrated, standard or no standard.

This protocol is about reducing the N languages and M editors = N*M client/server implementations with a much better N+M solution, where we don't have to reinvent 200 wheels every time someone makes a new editor or language.

And the protocol is open. Seriously what do you have to lose, besides a shit-ton of redundant work?

Distrust? Distrust exactly what? Are you sure you aren't being your own worst enemy?

See here for a list of fully open source and MS-independent implementations: http://langserver.org/

Too late to edit, so replying to self.

Looking at that list, I see Go is actually doing pretty well these days. I retract my criticism.

That said, as the page shows, having full editor support these days is getting pretty common.

The issue there is that Python is a dynamic language. Syntactic resolution of what a "thing" is in, in some sense, not supposed to always work -- otherwise it would be a static language!

Being able to recognize what a syntactic entity represents -- type or value or whatever -- has been supported by the editor plugins for static languages for a very long time.

For sure, but then there are mainstream static languages like Java/Scala which still lack that kind of support (e.g. ensime and friends, which work unpredictably, if at all).

I've been using the Gogland beta for the last few weeks and it's been quite stable. For large codebases, it's hard to beat a good IDE's ability to quickly jump between symbols (go to definition, find usages, etc).

Check out godef/guru - they let you do all those things (and more) in a text editor.

Oh, very cool. Will definitely check out guru. Thanks for the tip.

I for one will be more interested in using Go when Jetbrains finishes their IDE.

Gogland will be better, but for now, Jetbrains Webstorm with the Go plugin is pretty good.

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