Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by CraigJPerry | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

CraigJPerry

>> Made by really famous veteran language designers

Yeah that’s a positive

>> Backed by Google

But that’s a negative, https://killedbygoogle.com/

I definitely think you’re too fast to dismiss the language features contributing to popularity. As an example:

Fast builds are a positive developers immediately warm to when they experience them (stand by for rustacean “i need time to make tea and my compile times are exactly the right length for tea break” type comment). The example of the 4.4mb c++ project that results in the compiler ingesting 8Gb of data is eye opening. C++ needs to resolve type information for all includes and all their includes and all their includes… go only needs the interface so compilation can be done without all that effort.

View on HN

>> Made by really famous veteran language designers > Yeah that’s a positive

No, that's also a negative. C is close to assembly and produces fast code but it's weakly typed and very unsafe. Pascal was the strongly typed and safe option but people went for C because speed was considered more important than safety back when processors were slow.

In today's online world, we've realized safety is more important than speed. We write web apps in slower interpreted languages and Rust is a response to unsafe code that can be hacked like a hot knife through butter. I consider it a move in the right direction.

So I don't consider Go being made by really famous veteran language designers to be a plus because they produced a poor language that only won out because it neglected safety in a quest for speed. That wasn't as bad when computers weren't online, but it still allowed programmers to make errors that caused code to crash. Today it's become a critical issue.

Interestingly, Go is more like Pascal, Modula-2 and Oberon than like C, except in syntax. With Go, the creators of C have admitted Niklaus Wirth was right.

>> but it's weakly typed and very unsafe

Oh here we go :-) and yet the world spins on C kernels and lands jumbo jets in C autopilots and regulates heartbeats with C pacemakers and, and, and …

It seems there’s more nuance to this than just “strong types good”.

>> people went for C because speed was considered more important than safety

But for the past 10-27 years people have the choice to use a fast and safe language (java, c#, go) and they do, in very large numbers.

For the past 10 years (-ish) they’ve had the choice to use rust too - but they don’t. Rust has a popularity comparable to clojure or erlang.

> fast and safe language (java, C#...)

No, no even close. Java and C# crawled on a Pentium III-IV even with SSE2 compared to C and C++.

If you said Ocaml...

I started using java at 1.4, i remember Sun shouting to anyone who would listen that HotSpot could beat the gcc of the time on some 32bit integer benchmarks. IIRC it wasn't a million miles off the pace for floating point operations either.

> Oh here we go :-) and yet the world spins on C kernels and lands jumbo jets in C autopilots and regulates heartbeats with C pacemakers and, and, and …

Keep in mind that many of those things are written in a subset of the C programming language, such as MISRA C.

Absolutely, just as there are many ways to achieve C speed in languages like Java for particular sections of code by applying non-idiomatic optimisations, there are also many ways to improve safety beyond just types. Even things like the borrow checker has decent alternatives (tsan, msan etc.) that can be used in existing language stacks.

MISRA as you point out is another useful tool in the toolbox.

Pascal in DOS was as fast as C if no more.

Turbo Pascal wasn't entirely compliant to the Pascal spec either.

Production class Pascal compilers weren't, thus the Kernigham meme about Pascal misses the point that outside UNIX and a few other systems, the Pascal dialect people were using was as capable.

Likewise outside UNIX, the C compilers that were starting to appear were just as fragemented, supporting only subsets of K&R C.

The "Pascal-like" elements are the contribution of Robert Griesemer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Griesemer), who studied in Zurich and is also a co-creator of Go. The syntax has the curly braces and other C-family elements to appear more familiar (plus nobody really wants to write "begin ... end" all the time), but the declaration syntax is also Pascal-style ("x int" instead of "int x"). What reminded me most of Pascal when I first saw it was the ":=", but it has a different meaning in Go than in Pascal.

...and "really famous veteran language designers" wouldn't become famous veterans if they wouldn't learn something along the way.

You've completely mixed up two different senses of "unsafe", the one where the language is prone to idioms that cause fatal errors (which is also true of all those slower interpreted languages), and the one where a mistake means the program can do literally anything (which is not true of Go).

"Unsafe" in most discussions today refers exclusively to the latter.

I really dislike this meme of pointing out that Google has deprecated a lot of projects. Do people actually expect Google to staff people & resources running every project they've released forever?

A more interesting comparison would be open source projects that Google has abandoned or failed to properly hand over control of to the community, especially if we're talking about Go.

I agree.

It is true that Google has some poor product management and has some hilariously inept examples or product coherency (chat being the biggest disaster). But people praise startups for pivoting (read: killing a product) and (in general) demand innovation over glacial iteration. Trying new stuff necessarily means killing things that don't work (or paying a whole bunch of engineers to maintain a dead product for eternity).

>> But people praise startups for pivoting ...

Yes, but you discount the size of Google. Some of the things Google has killed have been large enough to have been considered successful products for a startup. They kill a "tiny" product because it's only large enough to be what some startup hopes to become. Google Reader is my favorite example of this. Multiple companies now exist in the soil on top of that grave.

It’s not clear to me that Go would survive Google giving up its continued investment.

Go has the fundamentals to survive - it’s open source, it has a healthy amount of contribution from non-google employees, the compiler is written in Go (that’s important when you consider an alternative situation like a python or js developer who wants to contribute a change to their compiler (they need to learn c / c++ respectively), i strongly suspect that if google walked away tomorrow, the velocity of change to the compiler, stdlib etc would not massively drop in the short term.

Medium / long term though… would i bet on Go over Java? It’s not clear to me that Go has reached the level of market penetration to make that a simple question.

Edit: i meant to add halo projects like docker, kube etc. as reasons to suggest the Go community is healthy

I think we have some models of what would happen to Go without Google, it's probably similar to what happened to Java under the weaker period of Oracle's stewardship.

The tool as-it-is keeps chugging along pretty well and even improving in small ways, but it stops reacting to larger trends and misses the boat at critical moments. Some new language in the same space comes up and finds it easy to shear off a massive portion of its user base by doing "the same thing, but modern".

(Less obvious models would be PHP to backend JS, and PHP and Python to Go, which had similar community development arcs.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com