I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of plain old C, as well hundreds of thousands of lines of Go over a career spanning three decades. I've used Go in earnest since 2013.
I would pick Go for any large project in a heartbeat.
I have to concur that the haters who post to HN probably have never used this language in earnest.
Here's what you get out of the box:
* Extensive standard library
* Cheap concurrency
* Fast compilation
* Built-in test/benchmark framework, including coverage and race detection
* Built-in heap and CPU profiling
Of all the complaints the one I understand the least is the reservations about performance. It is within 10-20% of C, and callouts to C and assembly are possible. (My 8-way multiplexed MD5 routine was written in AVX assembler and lives on in minio.) Extracting that last 10-20% is two or three sigmas away from the norm of how programming languages are used these days.
The objection to generics is similar. The lack of generics shows up -- once in a long while. It doesn't prevent me from being immensely productive with this language.
Looking back at the last few years I've wondered if I could have accomplished what I did in Go by using a different language (C in particular) and the answer, for me, is "not a chance".
I would pick Go for any large project in a heartbeat.
I have to concur that the haters who post to HN probably have never used this language in earnest.
Here's what you get out of the box:
* Extensive standard library * Cheap concurrency * Fast compilation * Built-in test/benchmark framework, including coverage and race detection * Built-in heap and CPU profiling
Of all the complaints the one I understand the least is the reservations about performance. It is within 10-20% of C, and callouts to C and assembly are possible. (My 8-way multiplexed MD5 routine was written in AVX assembler and lives on in minio.) Extracting that last 10-20% is two or three sigmas away from the norm of how programming languages are used these days.
The objection to generics is similar. The lack of generics shows up -- once in a long while. It doesn't prevent me from being immensely productive with this language.
Looking back at the last few years I've wondered if I could have accomplished what I did in Go by using a different language (C in particular) and the answer, for me, is "not a chance".