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Comment by noelh | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently taking the class. C++ was used before. The main reasons the professor cited for using Go are that it has a very easy to use RPC library and that the labs are designed so that you will spend most of your time working on the distributed systems aspects of the problems, not dealing with the intricacies of the language or libraries used. Apparently he felt Go was better for that than C++, though he didn't spend any time comparing the two.

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I took 824 last Spring and the labs were often terrible because of the level of debugging necessary (but very informative and well made). In particular it was bad for those without much C++ experience like myself. I think the difficulty of testing and worrying more about small bugs rather than the concepts of distributed systems was a common complaint and it's awesome to see it being changed. This class was also taught by rtm the semester I took it.

"Taught by RTM" == "taught by read the manual"?

RTM = Robert Tappan Morris, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

Another reason may be that it's easy to let students validate their work with the built in `go test`.

> Your job is to modify client.go, server.go, and common.go so that they pass the tests in test_test.go (which go test runs).

I wonder if it was would be easier (and legal) to just mock the functions so that tests pass, without writing any actual functionality.

I don't think you could do this without actually solving the labs the way we wanted you to.

I took this class in 2008, in C++, and the RPC code definitely felt like a mess. I expect the Go version must be nicer, plus a fresh rewrite probably helps regardless of language.

Enjoy the course, it's a great one!

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