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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

No really! Go isn't like other languages. You have to think differently. Please try it!

There's no such thing as, say, Maven binary dependencies for Java. If you don't check in the source code for your dependencies, your team member won't get the same version as you have and builds won't be reproducible. You won't be able to go back to a previous version of your app and rebuild it, because the trunk of your dependencies will have changed. By checking in the source code you're avoid a whole lot of hurt.

Checking in source is okay because Go source files are small and the compiler is fast. There isn't a huge third-party ecosystem for Go yet.

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> There's no such thing as, say, Maven binary dependencies for Java.

I'm saying there should be, but not necessarily the same thing. That's my entire point.

I'm also not a fan of the "you have a dissimilar opinion to mine, so obviously you've never used Go properly" attitude in this thread. One way to read your last is that I've never used Go at all, though I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you meant used Go properly. Either way, I don't get the condescension of assuming I'm unaware of everything you're explaining to me simply because I have an opinion that is different than yours. Especially since half of your comment is repeating things to me that I said earlier.

Maybe it sounds like condescension. I was in the same place at the beginning. No exceptions? No generics? Heresy. How dare you Go people ignore my many years of experience? I wrote a few rants to the mailing list, which were basically ignored.

The reason I assume you haven't used Go much is that your examples of problems with checking stuff in aren't examples of problems happening in Go. It's an analogy with other languages and other environments. Such arguments don't seem to get very far.

Maybe it won't scale and something will have to give. I expect the Go maintainers will find their own solution when it happens, and it won't look like Maven or traditional shared libraries. (If anything, it might be by replacing Git/hg with something that scales better.)

Except this does not work for commercial software, which is expected to give you only packages.

Right, "go install" is for open source projects.

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