this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Today I Learned

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Today I Learned (TIL). You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?

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TIL: Go is actually pretty amazing (kbin.melroy.org)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am able to use different programming languages. I know most of the well-known languages ​​without any problems: C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, Typescript, PHP...

However, I wanted to expand my horizon. Zig didn't do much for me neither did Rust, but now that I've written some Golang. I admit, I'm intrigued by the language.

I love the fact it's compiled to native machine language. There is still one caveat: despite Go being a GC language, you often still need to manage your memory. Sound strange right? But I needed to use io.Copy instead of io.ReadAll to avoid memory issues. But also you need to explicitly call defer res.Body.Close() to avoid Go not cleaning-up the HTTP response.. Ow well, so you learn it the hard way. Overall, I'm still very optimistic with Go. And looking forward to use it more often in some of my open-source projects.

See my first project in Go: https://gitlab.melroy.org/melroy/gitlab-artifact-deployer-go. Which I wrote in 3 days.

Did you try Go? What are your thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-ride

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks, I will read it today!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

yeah Go’s pretty good, especially for web services. i don’t have much of a space in my toolbox for it personally, though that’s not a fault of the language.

there’s a difference between managing memory and managing resources more generally. a GC doesn’t know when you’re done dealing with a file or a database connection or some other collection of data structures that has some semantically non-deterministic lifetime.

Rust however can close resources automatically with its lifetime mechanism ;)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

True true, Rust can indeed automatically close resources with its lifetime mechanisms. However, I found Rust very painful to program in. Totally skill issue! However, I didn't like Rust yet. Maybe when you really need Rust, I can imagine you want to do that route.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I love Rust but hate how it is typed, gives me RSI.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

@[email protected] i recently tried Go for the first time. just trying to parse some nested json from a file was quite painful as there seems to be no easy way to parse arbitrary json. it always needed a struct, which for complex json is quite awful to write out.

safe to say, since i have absolutely no need to the language, i won't be using it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children) 
map[string]any
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks for mentioning this. So it is possible without defining the whole struct. Great!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

this is an example of task easier achieved in dynamically typed languages e. g. Ruby, python, elixir

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

No.. In production you don't want dynamically typed languages. Frankly, even TypeScript is still not good enough (since it still compiles to JS and the value can become any kind of type during runtime), it can cause catastrophic failures and errors in production. When you write a back-end server, I learned my lesson the hard way, I believe you want a statically typed language for better safety, security and mainly predictability at runtime.

Python is fine for some simple scripts here and there, but please do not use it for critical production software. Please ..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I understand your situation, apparently there are workarounds for with as listed in this comment thread. Statically typed languages catch errors at compile time, ensuring robust code and safer refactoring, while also allowing for better performance optimizations. Their explicit type annotations enhance code clarity and maintainability, making it easier to understand and manage large codebases. This leads to more reliable and efficient backend systems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

@[email protected] i mean, you can have a statically typed language and safely handle arbitrayry json. you just need Tagged Union types in the language, which make it easy to type hierarchical structures where each level is one of a set of types

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yup! I had a great time with go.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Nice!.. I don't know who down voted you, but glad to hear.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

NO GO SUCKS /s

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why don't you like go? Or?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

watch the /s 😁

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Ow sorry. It was sarcasm.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I've tried to learn Go, but I just couldn't wrap my head around it, how to see the field and where to go.

Yes, I suck at the board game.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That is another kind of Go. You are talking about the board game Go. I'm talking about the programming language Go. hehe!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, well aware, it just amused me at the time.