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Comment by TheBlight | Hacker News Reader

I find that people with much more C/C++ experience (>5 years) tend to appreciate Go the most. Present company included.

>I find that people with much more C/C++ experience (>5 years) tend to appreciate Go the most. Present company included.

In our shop there's plenty of former C++ devs who are now writing in Go and enjoying it, myself included. Initially everyone was skeptical and dismissive of the language to say the least ("no generics? ha!") but as soon as we started developing and releasing our first microservices people began to appreciate how smooth and painless the whole development process had become. I remember with horror our C++ projects' 2 hour long rebuilds, 1 GB debug binaries, days of chasing memory corruption heisenbugs... It's symbolic that the last C++ talk I attended before fully transitioning to Go was by a guy from Intel who spent 2 hours talking about how they abused templates to write allocators which allocate other allocators at compile time... Fortunately Go devs don't have this cult of overengineering that's plaguing C++, we're getting things done and release cycles are now much shorter and with less stress.

I like to describe Go as "what you wish C were while you're writing C". Not "what C should be", that's probably Rust or something. Go is C, with the pain points filed off.

I think you meant to say 'C Experience'.

No C++ coder I know (at least the true C++ coders, e.g. ones who have abandoned the 'Simplicity of C' mantra), find nothing of use in go besides a draconian single truth model of 'the best way to do things' similar to Python.

That is really opposite of the C++ experience, where you have millions of different patterns, techniques, and pitfalls at every corner. Those who enjoy this, are definitely not go enthusiasts.

Now I'm not saying ones better than the other, but I really doubt C++ core find Go attractive. Go was invented on the premise that 'We hate C++' or something to that regard.

C++ ICs won't find much to love about opinionated Go, but once they start leading/managing a team, they will like it a lot more.

Well, good to know that after my decades of C++ experience, I’m still not a “true C++ coder.” You certainly can’t lose with an argument like that ;)

> That is really opposite of the C++ experience, where you have millions of different patterns, techniques, and pitfalls at every corner.

Exactly right. And everyone who is serious about the mission and not “enjoying the process” is so so tired of c++ with its “millions of different patterns, techniques, and pitfalls at every corner” and c++ devs that need to be convinced not to do crazy shit just bc they can

When I finished coding C++ professionally the general sentiment of the team was to use less C++ than more. When possible, it was advised to treat it more like C but with classes. The goal was stability above all else and easiness to reason about (for everyone.) That's why when Go was announced its design direction made perfect intuitive sense to me and anyone that spent years writing mission critical C++ on large teams.

Yes but many organizations make agreeing on “using less c++” very hard these days. Google kind of managed with their strict review/readability process and pretty much mandatory tooling but it’s damn near impossible in many startups to do the same without a huge political capital to spend. Go takes that challenge from organization level and largely pushes it down to language level.

The loudest voices usually win. I've since exited the tech world but back then the people I surrounded myself with were committed to product and solving business issues in the cleanest way possible and not trying to prove to one another which one of us was smarter.

I've written production C++ code for > 10 years, and I would definitely prefer to use Go for a lot of programs. Yes, it might be slower for some use-cases, it has some ugly parts. But it's also orders of magnitude easier to understand and the ability to just focus on the actual problem statement and build a solution instead of nerding out over language features is nice. I'm definitely not enjoying reverse engineering some smart SFINAE code, and writing any networking code with asio is also no longer very high on my "love to do things" list. I would rather deal with a few "if (err != nil) { return nil, err; }" statements.

But maybe it just depends on what "true C++ coders" means. If it's C++ enthusiasts for the sake of loving the language, I'm sure you are right. If it's "C++ users", because that was 10 years ago the best tool to solve a certain set of problems and the jobs where mostly C++, there's likely a few who are open to other tools to solve their problems.

That said I'm

I've noticed that people coming from Python tend to appreciate it as well. The fast compile-times make the language _feel_ dynamic, the concurrency story is much nicer than in Python, the type system is helpful without being pedantic, and interfaces are safer duck-types.

Type checking and lack of dynamic everything is a relief :)

Not really, for Rob Pike's desilusion.

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...

C, yes. C++, definitely not.

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