top | item 29514117

(no title)

opmac | 4 years ago

> I couldn't say exactly why it got popular.

Probably because it has the backing of Google.

discuss

order

ts4z|4 years ago

I disagree. Go provides a low-runtime way of writing programs, like C, without having to resort to managing memory and threads super carefully. No VM, no interpreter, fairly straightforward to imagine what the compiler is doing.

You can do the same work in Java but you can't statically link the JVM. You can sort of do these in Python, but the compiler story is murky at best, and the language isn't as type safe.

saghm|4 years ago

> No VM, no interpreter

That's not quite accurate; there is a runtime, it just gets statically linked into the binary instead of needing to be externally installed

earthboundkid|4 years ago

Counterpoint: Dart.

nauticacom|4 years ago

I thought of Dart as a counterpoint, but if anything it's actually more proof. Dart kinda failed as a language in the browser because Google didn't really push it, and when they did it got pushback. Now that they've repurposed it for building mobile apps, it's surprisingly popular. Sure, not Go-levels of popular, but leaps and bounds more popular than if it were some scrappy OSS project. And it's in a similar camp to Go: reasonably uncontroversial (it's basically Java), large suite of libraries, backed by Google.