this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Rust is Eating JavaScript (leerob.com)
submitted 3 weeks ago by volkerwirsing@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] Tanoh@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Has Golang fizzled? It has struck me as too primitive, but basically on the right track.

My biggest issue with Golang by far is the close tie to Google. They are not our friendly innovator, time and time again they make decisions that will help them earn more ad money, and nothing else. And they have a lobg history of releasing something and then never fix the issues with it, and then more or less abandon it.

Other than that there are afaik some other issues with go, I'm not an expert but from what I hear the GC is quite aggressive and you can't tell it to run when you want. Doing something time sensitive? Well, bad luck. GC time!

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 2 points 3 weeks ago

the close tie to Google.

Guess who's one of the rounders of the Rust Foundation...

[–] solrize@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

True about Google ;). Yes, there are programs that really don't want GC. I consider those to mostly be niche applications since most of us are fine with using e.g. Python, which has automatic storage management (won't quibble about whether it is GC per se) that has occasional pauses. SImilarly, tons of important programs are written in Java, which is GC'd. Of course Java is tied up with Oracle just like Go is tied up with Google.

Go's main problem from what I can tell is that the language itself is too old fashioned. I've used it but am not expert. It feels like an improved version of C, rather than a modern, type-safe language.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The GC in Go is fantastic IMO since it runs in a separate thread. I used it since 1.0 (switched our product from node.js), and dealt with all the the pain of an imprecise GC (fixed in 1.5?) and all the little improvements to arrive at it's current state.

The main issues I have with it are pretty core to the language, unfortunately, such as:

  • interface{} is basically a void*, but since it's a fat pointer, it can hold nil without itself being nil, which can happen by accident
  • runtime reflection is a bad habit, but it's unfortunately really common
  • it's really easy to deadlock by making stupid mistakes; if it had automatic unlocking based on scope (like Rust, or something like Python's context managers), we could solve this, but defer just isn't good enough
  • no destructors - with destructors, we could build a solution to deadlocks

Maybe they fixed some of those issues, idk, I haven't used it for several years. I did use it for about 10 years though.