It took a few more years before I actually got around to learning it and I have to say I've never picked up a language so quickly. (Which makes sense, it's got the smallest language spec of any of them)
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons this is wrong, but it feels like Go gets me 80% of the way to Rust with 20% of the effort.
I don't see it. Can you say what 80% you feel like you're getting?
The type system doesn't feel anything alike, I guess the syntax is alike in the sense that Go is a semi-colon language and Rust though actually basically an ML deliberately dresses as a semi-colon language but otherwise not really. They're both relatively modern, so you get decent tooling out of the box.
But this feels a bit like if somebody told me that this new pizza restaurant does a cheese pizza that's 80% similar to the Duck Ho Fun from that little place near the extremely tacky student bar. Duck Ho Fun doesn't have nothing in common with cheese pizza, they're both best (in my opinion) if cooked very quickly with high heat - but there's not a lot of commonality.
I read it as “80% of the way to Rust levels of reliability and performance.” That doesn’t mean that the type system or syntax is at all similar, but that you get some of the same benefits.
I might say that, “C gets you 80% of the way to assembly with 20% of the effort.” From context, you could make a reasonable guess that I’m talking about performance.
Rust beats Go in performance.. but nothing like how far behind Java, C#, or scripting languages (python, ruby, typescript, etc..) are from all the work I've done with them. I get most of the performance of Rust with very little effort a fully contained stdlib/test suite/package manger/formatter/etc.. with Go.
Writing microservices at $DAYJOB feels far easier and less guess-work, even if it requires more upfront code, because it’s clear what each piece does and why.
It really feels like a simpler language and ecosystem compared to Python. On top of that, it performs much better!
Recently I made the same assertions as to Go's advantage for LLM/AI orchestration.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895897
It would not surprise me that Google (being the massive services company that it is) would have sent an internal memo instructing teams not to use the Python tool chain to produce production agents or tooling and use Golang.
At work we use Uber’s NillAway, so that helps bit. https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway Though actually having the type system handle it would be nicer.
If I had a magic wand, the only things I would add is better nulability checks, add stack traces by default for errors, and exhaustive checks for sum types. Other than that, it does everything I want.
Linters such as https://golangci-lint.run will do this for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)#Con...
tschellenbach•52m ago
go is amazing. switches from python to go 7 years ago. It's the reason our startup did well