Hacker News Reader

Comment by Filligree | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to meet anyone inside Google who actually likes the language. At best they call it a decent replacement for C or C++, which is damning with faint praise. Lots of people are neutral, of course.

View on HN

I like it. My brain's already pretty full with trying to get a ML pipeline optimized and launchable, and if I need to write something to read a CSV file, make some RPC calls to a service for each row, and dump the results to a file, go just works.

Sure, I could use something like Haskell, but then I'd have to worry about whether I'm accumulating a giant stack of thunks that'll blow up. go just works, and less of it will bit-rot than the comparable python script, thanks to at least some types.

This is why the SREs seem to be fans, e.g. https://talks.golang.org/2013/go-sreops.slide#1

trying to get a ML pipeline optimized

I wrote some machine learning tools in Go and the experience is quite bad. The lack of operator overloading and parametric polymorphism make most ML code ugly. It also does not help that Go's compiler backend does not optimize very strongly and calling out to C comes with a relatively large overhead.

Sure, I could use something like Haskell, but then I'd have to worry about whether I'm accumulating a giant stack of thunks that'll blow up.

There are many languages between Go and Haskell that are productive and provide a sufficiently strong type system.

Yeah, the ML parts aren't in Go. I'm working in TensorFlow, so it's C++ scripted by Python. But there's a lot of incidental stuff that needs to be done, most of which I don't want to spend cycles on thinking hard about, and Go does a good job there, in that narrow niche where I want something that runs on one machine but find python too slow.

At a previous gig, I had done a lot of F#, and I think that's close to my personal sweet spot, but I'd have to use it frequently to keep it in my head. Go is small enough that I can load it into cache when I need it.

But there's a lot of incidental stuff that needs to be done, most of which I don't want to spend cycles on thinking hard about, and Go does a good job there, in that narrow niche where I want something that runs on one machine but find python too slow.

Definitely! I have continued to use Go for small utility every now and then as well. The standard library is extremely well-suited for that kind of work.

(Now using Rust more in that role as well, but mostly to get continued practice ;).)

I think in areas where there's a lot of math, the absence of generic collections might prove to be a frustration relative to C++ or Java (both allowed languages at Google).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com