I don’t know about that, it was called a systems language when it came out. By any common usage of the term, it’s definitely not that.

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9rx a day ago | parent [-]

By the common usage of the term, it is most definitely a systems language.

Systems are the "opposite" of scripts. Scripts are programs that perform a one-off task and then exit. Systems are programs that run indefinitely to respond to events. We have scripting languages and we have systems languages. While all languages can ultimately be used for both workloads, different feature-sets gear a language towards one or the other. Go is does not exhibit the traits you'd expect of a scripting language.

This idea that Go isn't a systems language seems to stem from "Rustacians" living in the same different world which confused sum types with enums, where they somehow dreamed up that systems are low-level programs such as kernels. To be fair, kernels are definitely systems. They run indefinitely too. But a user land server program that runs continuously to serve requests is also a system as the term has been normally used.

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dontlaugh a day ago | parent [-]

Long before Rust or Go existed, “systems languages” were commonly the ones you can write a whole system in to run on hardware, like C, Pascal or C++. I’m not opposed to that definition changing, but it certainly hadn’t when Go came out.

I agree that Rust enums should have been called unions, though.

	▲	9rx a day ago \| parent [-]
		While that does not match my memory, it works too. An assembly language is part of Go, so it fits among the languages you mention. The only constraint it imposes is your imagination (and what the hardware is capable of). However, it remains that "systems language" was caveated as being for network servers specifically. But no matter how you slice it, I think we can agree that Go isn't a scripting language, so it must be a systems language. Rust does use enums under the hood in order to implement sum types, so the name as it is used within the language is perfectly valid. It's just not clear how that turned into nonsense like Go not having enums (which it does).