Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Golang if you're writing systems-y network-y code more than application-y database-y code.

Scala if you're more interested in language theory and statically analyzable correctness. Or, again, if you're doing anything database-intensive.

Golang is a very pleasant language to get systems-y things done in. I'm fond of saying that it's not an amazing language, but is an amazing programming tool.

Scala is going to be much friendlier to you if you're into language features; generics would be a big one, pattern matching is a Scala-y one.

Are you writing web apps? I'd give the nod to Scala.

Are you much more inclined to write a web service, something that spits JSON out instead of HTML? Golang back in the running.

IRC server? Golang.

Social network? Scala.

Emulator? Golang.

Compiler? Scala.

Do you like C, even though you never use it anymore? Golang.

Do you think a lot about someday learning Haskell? Scala.

Are you picky about languages? Golang will occasionally frustrate you with the things it lacks. Scala will occasionally frustrate you with the things it has.

They're both good languages and --- unless you need a graphical UI (in which case: Scala) --- both of them will do better than Python for almost any task.

I'd just like to point out that most of our customers have webapps written in go - not just JSON apis so this argument that go is not for webapps is at best incorrect. I talk to gophers around the world everyday that are using it just for that.

They much rather hack on a webserver that they can use in 15 LOC from stdlib than some beefy JVM framework.

From the conversations I've had I strongly believe most webapps are going to be written in go in the coming years.

I'm a full-time Golang developer, the last product I shipped was a Rails app, and my career started in the 90s as a shrink-wrap C software developer. Golang is an unpleasant environment in which to build web applications:

* Good SQL persistence abstractions aren't there yet, so realistic SQL-backed applications depend on writing tons of raw SQL and (worse) parsing results. Like a savage.

* Golang's built-in templating is good for self-contained full templates but not great for hierarchies of templates and partials.

* Golang's net/http library is so good that it's a gravity well for other request handling abstractions, so that sessions, CSRF tokens, and access control either have to be built directly on Golang's equivalent of Rack, or inevitably get put into libraries that conceal too much of net/http.

"Going with the flow" and writing idiomatic Golang code feels a lot like writing those Sinatra apps where you get 1/3rd of the way through and regret not just using Rails.

You can totally write a good web app in Golang, especially if you're doing minimal serverside HTML generation and leaning on something like React or Angular or Ember instead. But it's not what Golang is best at.

Meanwhile, Scala is both a language designed in part for serverside web apps and built on the JVM.

If you're writing a web application, where your functionality is exposed by a port 443 that Firefox connects to directly and asks for "/" from, I'd prefer Scala to Golang.

Reasonable people can disagree or object to any of this, but I'm not going to waste time sugarcoating.

Thanks. This is really helpful advice, and the ORM-related comments you made resonate with me, because the use of abstracted data backing services is sort of the meat and potatoes in just about any web app I can think of, and this was a real pain point in my initial research of Go. All of the ORM-ish things I've found are mediocre, at best, IMHO.

I ROFL at "Like a savage.", btw.

You can get around it by using more recent databases; Rethink for instance might close the gap. But then you're using an idiosyncratic database for kind of a weird reason. Personally, I want to preserve a default of using Postgres, and I don't like that Golang pulls me away from that a little.

That said: I really like Golang a lot.

For Microcorruption, we did the overwhelming majority in Golang, exposing it as a JSON RPC endpoint, and then did the UI in a very small amount of Rails. It worked quite well.

One thing you can for sure say about Golang: it is fast. We deployed 3 app servers but if we had deployed only 1 it still wouldn't have broken a sweat.

I agree 100% about your Postgres point. I don't want to ever be in a situation where I can't use Postgres, unless we're in a situation wherein Postgres has taken the back seat to some other database that is A) ACID compliant, B) really fast and scalable and B) fairly widely adopted.

Agreed: 1) SQL is not solved in an ORM sense. Yes you will have to write sql statements. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing.

Beg-to-differ: 1) Templating works very well for me. You can pass variables to embedded template "partials" within a template. You can define your own functions for the templating engine to use etc. 2) net/http + gorilla (or something similar) and you have all of net/http exposed with some sugar on top. 3) csrf tokens are just a simple library. Yes you do have to be sure to put them into your templates.

If you are having difficulty with a middle-ware concept in terms of golang there are plenty of resources online.

So I would say that I have a different feeling about making websites in golang :) I enjoy it.

Those are a lot of the same things a Sinatra programmer could have said about using Sinatra instead of Rails. And it's true, you can, and in some cases you might even enjoy it (if nothing else, the code is more transparent in Sinatra or Golang).

If, however, you've had the experience of starting a project in Sinatra and ruefully finishing it in Rails, my advice is: don't do full-featured web apps entirely in Golang.

> I'd just like to point out that most of our customers have webapps written in go - not just JSON apis so this argument that go is not for webapps is at best incorrect.

The fact that your customers are using Go for webapps does not mean that tptacek's statement that he would give the nod to Scala for webapps but consider Go in the running with Scala for web APIs. Advice is not "incorrect" because some people make different choices.

> From the conversations I've had I strongly believe most webapps are going to be written in go in the coming years.

I'll be surprised if that ever happens. There's plenty of languages that have a good story for webapps -- Go certainly isn't the worst choice, but the advantages it has over some alternatives aren't all that unique, nor are they without tradeoffs. I wouldn't be surprised to see Go continue to make gains for a while (and then be passed up by newer things), but I don't see it ever being most webapps.

You state for web services that spit out JSON that Golang is better. Typically the JSON is a representation of data from a database (relational or otherwise) - how do you envision Golang doing this (spitting out JSON) well?

From a cursory look at Golang, I think there is a serious possibility to displace a lot of enterprise Java stuff especially web services that process XML at scale. There is so much baggage and stacks of frameworks to contend with that something much closer to the bare metal, so to speak, would be refreshing to use in that space. But if the DB handling is lacking that could be a turn-off for displacement.

You still have the persistence problem, but you don't have the others, so it's less of a drag.

I would bet money a network server in Scala can run circles around Go.

Excellent, thanks for the breakdown.

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