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Comment by yesimahuman | Hacker News Reader

Was it ever easy? I remember hours trying to figure out what to set GOPATH and GOHOME to and how to get “go get” to actually work. I can’t help but think go is a wonderful language with a poor package manager unfortunately woven directly into the language. Really makes npm feel wonderful in comparison.

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I cannot for the life of me understand why they don't make setting up all those variables part of the installer (in the case of Windows, and possibly Mac?) / first time setup process, or define some sane defaults that don't get in your way. I can't help but feel most people likely have a similar enough setup to how I have my environment variables configured at the minimum, why not automate that repetitiveness at the installer / default configuration level.

There is a default for GOPATH these days, it's ~/go on unix.

wasn't the case on mac when i dled golang 2 months ago

Not sure what your experience was. Release 1.8 started the default GOPATH in Feb 2017, which is a tad over two months ago. Maybe you somehow got an older version.

I found it quite easy to set two environment variables and never had issues with `go get` either.

"go get" is a disaster for any project of non trivial size. It was designed with the idea of a mono repo in mind - not a vast distributed network of independently evolving code repositories.

Never had any issues with that as soon as vendoring was an option. I routinely had/have three or more different non-trivial projects I was/am working on, and I dont recall ever having issues with go get. I started around maybe Go1.2. At first, I set GOPATH per project, but as soon as vendoring was a thing, one GOPATH to rule them all. Now, vendor updates to existing dependencies, there is something that has been a complete and utter disaster that hopefully gets better under the mod system.

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