But what is the selling point for Go? I get that it is allegedly hailed to be a simple language with basically no batteries included, but why is that a selling point? Does Go excel at anything no other language does?

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pylotlight an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Performance? Second only to rust and other lower level langs. Surely you don't need this spelled out for you...

	▲	nvader an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not just performance, but static typing and prevalent in the training data/easy for LLMs to reason about. Of course, your response admits, "second to Rust", which I am guessing is an unspoken question in the grandparent's mind.
	▲	za3faran 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Java and C# are there and faster.
	▲	hirvi74 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If performance is the main difference, whatever that means, then basically Go should be reserved for when Rust and other lower level langs cannot be used due to some other constraint? Are we mainly talking about performant Web backends? Say I am building some app that I know will be CPU-bound, why choose Go over say... Swift?

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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chickenman_98 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think that’s sort of the selling point no? It’s really boring. It has like -10 keywords, compiles insanely fast, and has a concurrency model that’s easy to use and read. LLMs are great at using Go tooling to sanity check along the way. It’s easy to write shitty Go but it’s really pleasant to work with if you find those things compelling.

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khimaros an hour ago | parent [-]

don't you worry about garbage collection?

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camdenreslink an hour ago | parent [-]

If you were using Python, then probably not.

	▲	bensyverson 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		haha exactly. I’m coming from Swift, and I don’t want to go back to manually releasing objects like I used to in ObjC, let alone reason about lifetimes.

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enneff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

For one thing it’s statically typed and has many fewer foot guns than Python, so the llm-produced code is more likely to do what you expect.

	▲	shepherdjerred an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Go is statically typed but the type system leaves much to be desired. Go’s benefit are primarily around simplicity, readability, and concurrency.