Hacker News Reader

Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Yeah i just see Go as an alternative for web technologies

I don't see any web technology Go could replace. Not even dynamically typed langauges.

We could not have handled the load at Microcorruption, emulating CPU state for thousands of concurrent users, using Ruby --- which remains the front-end language for the site.

We could easily have done so in Java, but we'd be in Java's concurrency model, which is much more difficult to reason about.

So, you did it in Go instead of Java, right?

I think this is exactly what people mean when they say Go is more of a replacement for Java than it is a replacement for C++: In the sense that when Ruby and Python become too slow, people normally reach for Java, but now they have Go as an alternative option, with a better concurrency model than Java's.

We never even considered writing it in Java. We wanted something with the performance characteristics of C, which is what we would have used had we not had Golang.

Golang does not have the "performance xteristics of C"!

I must just be crazy.

There are alternatives to Java's concurrency model whilst still staying on the JVM:

http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/

I'm starting to use Go as an arguably better Node. Very fast, easy (pseudo)concurrency, relatively nice HTTP capabilities in the stdlib. It wouldn't be my first choice for building a full library, but it works well as an internal component in a service oriented architecture or a background worker for a queuing system.

Go is very uncontroversially a better Node. It also predates Node.

Depends on what you mean by "better".

Better language? Not really, if you want types TypeScript is a much better option. With node+typescript+react you can get end-to-end typechecked code with no FFI involved - thats really, really cool.

Better concurrency? Oh yeah, definitely. Better core libraries? Yes, by far.

Better package ecosystem and management? Definitely not.

    > Better language? Not really,

There is no conceivable universe in which the expression "JavaScript is a better language than Go" evaluates to true.

...except for in JavaScript itself:

    ~$ node
    > "JavaScript is a better language than Go" ? true : false
    true
    > "JavaScript" > "Go"
    true

Unless/until Go gets generics, I stand by my statement. A horrible type system that severely limits expressiveness is worse than no type system. Even TypeScript's type system is miles ahead compared to the one in Go.

I doubt it. The node ecosystem is second to none.

All the things node is designed to do and it does it at least as fast as Go.

We can argue that the Go concurrency model is better.I think nodejs's is good enough,easier to understand and to deploy. If your goal is to write lightweight webservers that do a specific task,nothing beats node in my opinion.

> easier to ... deploy

Ehm, really? Tree of javascript, possibly with some compiled libraries easier to deploy than a static binary?

I'm not saying node is hard to deploy, but I think maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean here?

Prime candidate is any highly scalable TCP socket server. Currently, there's no better language for it

Erlang? That switch that is routing your phone calls?

Almost certainly not TCP socket based nor built on commodity hardware.

It hasn't rooted anybody's phone calls for a long time. Even Ericsson doesn't use Erlang based phone routing anymore...

Erlang is a better for it. WhatsApp runs their infrastructure on it. Can easily do millions of concurrent TCP connections on a single machine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com