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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I remember a time when people called Go a systems language, is that time over now?

Go can't be used for many "systems programming" problem domains because it's garbage collected. That objection is always looming when people try to call Go a "systems programming language", so I think a lot of people now classify Go as an applications programming language instead.

The only people who did that was the Go team itself, and they did so in contravention of the usual interpretation of the term, as by it they meant either the completely meaningless "you can built systems with it", or that you could build systems services or utilities (which is not what is usually meant by "systems language").

I'm not aware of any official or standard definition of system programming. There's application programming and anything which doesn't fit in there is system programming which can be low-level, middleware, etc.

Go is appropriate for writing services / daemons, command line tools, servers, etc. It's not well suited for writing operating system code and very performance-intensive code (databases, audio/video, etc), but there's still a big overlap with Rust.

It seems to me that this whole discussion keeps coming up because parts of the Rust community are worried about the competition. And they have reason to be :-)

golang is absolutely capable of writing databases and audio/video code. the libraries just dont really exist for the audio/video stuff.

but there are DBs written in go.

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