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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

>Restricting the language to its target use: systems programming, not applications or data science or AI...

The only Go I ever touched in industry was the backend of a web-app at Salesforce. I'm not sure this counts as "systems programming".

https://engineering.salesforce.com/einstein-analytics-and-go...

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Rob describes go as a language for writing server applications, and I think that is a much more applicable term than systems programming.

Drew DeVault called it an "internet" language back in 2021. And to that I more or less agree.

Read footnote 1 for context.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/02/Go-is-a-great-language.ht...

But then again the internet is everywhere now: desktop, servers, watches, washing machines, industrial systems, sensors ... So "internet language" is a somewhat pointless term.

That term isn’t meant to include mobile apps, desktop apps, web apps (even though those all use the internet, of course). Nobody is using Go for any of those, as far as I know.

So I think it is a useful term, and captures the things Go is good at surprisingly well.

I actually kinda thought that Google should have made Go the default language for android. It could have been a compelling argument to the rest of the world as a reason to use it as a systems language.

It's feels like they didn't want to dog food it outside of their servers, though.

Android was already using Java and Dalvik (their JVM variant) at that point, so switching to Go would have been a massive undertaking.

> Nobody is using Go for any of those, as far as I know.

Quite a few of us are, fwiw. I personally have done all three, Tailscale uses Gio UI for their mobile apps, and a fair amount of games have used https://ebitengine.org to release for Xbox/Nintendo Switch/Mobile/Webassembly/Cross-platform PC.

I hadn't heard of either of those projects -- both look really cool. Thanks for the pointers!

Yep, I'd say one of the things they could have done better is in making this distinction more clear to people. I spent multiple years being confused about what made go a "systems" language, when it didn't seem very good for that at all. When all the devops / infrastructure tooling started being written in it, its niche suddenly became more clear to me.

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