LLVM's Go Front-End Was Finally Dropped From The Official Source Tree

[Jabberwocky]

Guilty as charged.

Also, hate Go all you want, it's a great language. Sure, everyone will complain it's missing at least one of the feature they love in their preferred language, yet I found Go highly effective. And I don't get why it would need an LLVM front-end, the tools that come with the language are perfectly fine. And fast.

I agree. It is possible to, but I would not write an OS, drivers or AAA game in Go. It's good for pretty much anything else. TinyGo is officially a Google sponsored project (a few week back). I've been testing it with small ARM devices. I like Go because it focuses on motivating people to write maintainable code and how easy it is to make your abstracted code run on so many different hardware and software platforms. All your Arch/OS specific code/hacks are easy to find by people that have never worked on your project.

Go has many big and small projects. I don't like to say a language is good because a big company is using it, look at Facebook for example many of the languages that they use is not the best and projects that they have developed is badly designed (like Yarn). With that said HashiCorp, Netflix, CloudFlare, Uber, Dropbox, eBay, Twitter, Apple and more decided to use Go. Many new companies that I have done consulting for decided to use Go as much as possible. In theory I don't like it, but a few of my clients even rewrote entire projects in Go.

Just like people and projects, no programming languages are perfect. Unfortunately I have not seen any valid arguments in this thread so far, this suggests that ones complaining don't know it very well or don't want to take the time to provide constructive criticism. If you really wanted to argue without even learning Go you can talk about weaknesses of typed languages.

I've worked in x86-assembly, vhdl, c, c++, java, javascript, rust, c#, php, python, typescript, ruby, perl, coffeescript, erlang, elm, haskell, lisp, and some others like lua, java-bytecode, LaTeX, less, sass, stylus, sh, bash, zsh, bash-oo-framework, powershell, vbscript, actionscript, r, matlab, opencl, terraform, haxe, unrealscript, qtscript, etc... I would still like to learn objective-c, clojure, d, kotlin, swift, and scala. I am proud to have worked on some important projects, but for the most part I don't see myself as a hardcore theoretical software developer/analyst (I have too many hobbies). There's some a few very talented people out there with insane credentials who I like to listen to/read about.

[coder]

Well, I might be a bit strange but.. I do not understand why one would be afraid of "having to learn another language".. I mean, Isn't a big fun part of our profession to see how things can be done differently and maybe in a better way. To see the strengths and weaknesses of many possible solutions?

I think what people don't like is to pollute their mind with too many similar languages that don't really offer much in the way of new ideas or perspectives. Learning such languages tends to be a chore and doesn't really make you a better or more productive programmer (though, hopefully more employable).

If you're going to invest the time and energy to learn something different, better to learn something really different.

[coder]

Whoa. You mean Go's LLVM goings are gone?

What I found funny about Go is how it was originally pitched as a C++ replacement, yet -- upon brief inspection of some early post-1.0 iteration -- it struck me as much more functionally equivalent to Javascript.

[vein]

Yeah that's the typical CV I'm talking about where people master one big language and then get just productive enough to be able to browse through and hack a bit on other languages within the family. Some also squeeze in another big language in there. Typically at the expense of learning other languages... But practically speaking it just takes a few years to master any specific language and developers don't tend to stay full time developers past their mid-30s as they branch out into "System Architect / Tech Lead" and such so... Yeah. I stand by my claim: Most of the hate to new languages comes from people being scared from having to learn another language. And to those people, I'd only point out Go is genuinely unique being unusually readable, small and fast to pick up so it's about the last language anyone should be scared off. But this will need reevaluating around go2...

Well, I might be a bit strange but.. I do not understand why one would be afraid of "having to learn another language".. I mean, Isn't a big fun part of our profession to see how things can be done differently and maybe in a better way. To see the strengths and weaknesses of many possible solutions?

[archsway]

Yeah and that little bit of exposure to JavaScript ruined a lot of potential programmers.

FTFY.

[bug77]

Many adult people who are programmers learned BASIC as their first programming language during their childhood or teenage years in the 80/90-ties of the 20th century.

Guilty as charged.

Also, hate Go all you want, it's a great language. Sure, everyone will complain it's missing at least one of the feature they love in their preferred language, yet I found Go highly effective. And I don't get why it would need an LLVM front-end, the tools that come with the language are perfectly fine. And fast.

[c117152]

I agree on this and it is generally true but not always
This is my path: (Professional career) Java Developer -> Pascal Developer -> C# Developer -> Java Guru -> Golang Developer -> Rust Developer -> System Architect / Tech Lead (Basically coding anything right now)

So in some cases it might divert a bit..

Yeah that's the typical CV I'm talking about where people master one big language and then get just productive enough to be able to browse through and hack a bit on other languages within the family. Some also squeeze in another big language in there. Typically at the expense of learning other languages... But practically speaking it just takes a few years to master any specific language and developers don't tend to stay full time developers past their mid-30s as they branch out into "System Architect / Tech Lead" and such so... Yeah. I stand by my claim: Most of the hate to new languages comes from people being scared from having to learn another language. And to those people, I'd only point out Go is genuinely unique being unusually readable, small and fast to pick up so it's about the last language anyone should be scared off. But this will need reevaluating around go2...

[Lycanthropist]

Go would be a half decent programming language if it'd let me put the opening braces on a new line already.

[vein]

1. You can never really master more than a couple of big programming languages (C++, Java...) so even the thought of having to learn another language genuinely scares the shit out of most programmers.
2. Your first language tends to define your preferences in syntax and tolerance to different kinds of boilerplate. People coming from C and the modula family never have problems with Go. People coming from Python tend to complain about the lack of generics. People coming from C++ miss their leaky abstractions. And then there's the two LISP guys... Just remember not to form eye contact or show them your back and you should be fine.

I agree on this and it is generally true but not always
This is my path: (Professional career) Java Developer -> Pascal Developer -> C# Developer -> Java Guru -> Golang Developer -> Rust Developer -> System Architect / Tech Lead (Basically coding anything right now)

So in some cases it might divert a bit..

[c117152]

Yeah and that little bit of exposure to BASIC ruined a lot of potential programmers.

BASIC was fine as long as it was treated as a script language.

As for GO I’m in the let it die camp. As noted it takes a huge amount of effort to really master a language and in GO’s case I don’t see a lot on offer to justify the effort. At least not for general purpose programming. The average programmer would be better off looking into Python & C++ first and then looking at newer languages like Swift, Rust or something else.

Go only takes a couple of weekends if you already know Python and lets you write business grade back ends when you're done. The alternatives are months and years of C++ or Java.

I just don’t see the world flocking to GO.

Nothing else really fills that niche without major investments in training and personal.

Regardless, we'll see after the generics land in go2.

Well, I'm coming from "limited/not-very-using-templates" C++, on university.

Academically taught C++ is a fantasy. But lets move on...

Professionally, I'm full Java developer. And, on go I had very missed inheritance with polymorphism, at beginning. However go's interfaces without inheritance with polymorphism, heavily enforce clean code principles, ie. SOLID.

Yup. That's my point. You start out comparing to what you know. But you eventually get used to it.

And, I still miss generics, as some code is pretty much generic, ie. collection operations.

You miss writing generics I'm sure. But do you miss reading them? In a professional settings? With a half dozen developers working on the code base for years? With decades old legacy libraries?
I admit I miss them too at times but I don't miss delayed deadlines over a failure to trace and off-by-one generic overflow.