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Comment by geodel | Hacker News Reader

> forced down our throats when Google suddenly finds a need for them

You can say that about Go itself. And there are already other/better alternatives. So why use Go?

A language is valued by its programmer bench, tooling, available libraries, as well as the language itself. Honest question - what is better than go right now?

You'd have to specify the use case of interest. I don't think there's anything that uniformly dominates Go, but that's terribly interesting since there are so many dimensions of interest for a programming language that there aren't any languages in use that uniformly dominate some other language in use. (You can get uniform domination if you include unused language or esolangs, but who cares.) But there are certainly many use cases for which Go is not the best choice, not in the top 3-5, or straight-up not a viable choice.

C, c++, c#, Java, Python, Lua, lisp, Ada...

Go has its good sides, but it's just a tool. It's not the best, because tools aren't supposed to be the best. Tools are supposed to be useful for what they're made for.

I have a hard time with using Java to write micro-services. Even though lots of packages, such as Undertow, support non blocking I/O, a lot of the rest of the stack and the programmers that use it don’t know how to do NIO. What happens then is that the SRE/Ops team needs to configure large thread pools which consume lots of RAM just because multiplexing is I/O so difficult.

In comparison I can just start goroutines and Elixir processes for fast and simple I/O parallelism almost without thinking about it.

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