---
title: "Go programming language: my totally unprompted opinions"
author: Chris Hodapp
date: "2018-04-13"
tags:
- technobabble
- go
- golang
toc: true
---

# TODO: Link to my asyncio post

After I wrote my post on Python and asyncio, I had the opportunity to
work with the [[https://golang.org/][Go]] language for some other projects, and I started
jotting down my opinions on it as I did so.

After using it for a bit, I decided that it's mostly C with
concurrency, seamless [[https://www.slideshare.net/matthewrdale/demystifying-the-go-scheduler][M:N threading]], garbage collection, fast
compilation, namespaces, multiple return values, packages, a mostly
sane build system, no C preprocessor, *minimal* object-oriented
support, interfaces, anonymous functions, and closures.  Those aren't
trivialities; they're all rather great things.  They're all missing in
C and C++ (for the most part - excluding that C++11 has started
incorporating some). They're all such common problems that nearly
every "practical" C/C++ project uses a lot of ad-hoc solutions sitting
both inside and outside the language - libraries, abuse of macros,
more extensive code generation, lots of tooling, and a whole lot of
"best practices" slavishly followed - to try to solve them.  (No, I
don't want to hear about how this lack of very basic features is
actually a feature.  No, I don't want to hear about how painstakingly
fucking around with pointers is the hairshirt that we all must wear if
we wish for our software to achieve a greater state of piety than is
accessible to high-level languages.  No, I don't want to hear about
how ~$arbitrary_abstraction_level~ is the level that *real*
programmers work at, any programmer who works above that level is a
loser, and any programmer who works below that level might as well be
building toasters. Shut up.)

I'm a functional programming nerd. I just happen to also have a lot of
experience being knee-deep in C and C++ code.  I'm looking at Go from
two perspectives: compared to C, and compared to any other programming
language that might be used to solve similar problems.

It still has ~goto~.  This makes the electrical engineer in me happy.
Anyone who tells me I should write in a C-like language without goto
can go take a flying leap.

The concurrency support is excellent when compared to C and even
compared to something like Python.  The ability to seamlessly
transition a block of code in between running sychronously and running
asynchronously (by making it into a goroutine) is very helpful, and so
is the fact that muxes these goroutines onto system threads more or
less transparently.

Concurrency was made a central aim in this language.  If you've not
watched Rob Pike's [[https://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism][Concurrency is not parallelism]] talk, go do it now.
While I may not be a fan of the style of concurrency that it uses
(based on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes][CSP]] rather than the more Erlang-ian message passing), this
is still a far superior style to the very popular concurrency paradigm
of Concurrency Is Easy, We'll Just Ignore It Now and Duct-Tape the
Support On Later, How Hard Could It Possibly Be.  [[http://jordanorelli.com/post/31533769172/why-i-went-from-python-to-go-and-not-nodejs][Why I went from
Python to Go (and not node.js)]], in my opinion, is spot-on.

Many packages are available for it, and from all I've seen, they are
sensible packages - not [[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4bjss2/an_11_line_npm_package_called_leftpad_with_only/][leftpad]]-style idiocy.  I'm sure that if I look
more carefully, a lot of packages mostly exist in order to patch over
limitations in the language - but so far, I've yet to encounter a
single 3rd-party uber-package that is effectively a requirement for
doing any "real" work in the language, while the standard libraries
don't look excessive either.

I don't exactly make it a secret that I am [[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/object-oriented-programming-is-an-expensive-disaster-which-must-end][not]] [[https://medium.com/@cscalfani/goodbye-object-oriented-programming-a59cda4c0e53#.7t9nj6geg][a fan]] of
[[http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_sucks][object-oriented programming]].  I like that Go's support for OOP is
rather minimal: it's just interfaces and some syntactic sugar around
structs.

The syntax and typing are very familiar to anyone who has used C, and
they seem to make it easy for editors/IDEs to integrate with (likely
by design).  It all feels very solid.

However, while [[https://blog.golang.org/defer-panic-and-recover][defer, panic, and recover]] are an improvement over C,
I'm less a fan of its oppositions to exceptions as a normal
error-handling mechanism.  Whatever the case, it was a conscious
design decision, not an oversight; see [[https://davidnix.io/post/error-handling-in-go/][Go's Error Handling is Elegant]]
and Pike's [[https://blog.golang.org/errors-are-values][Errors Are Values]].  The article [[http://250bpm.com/blog:4][Why should I have written
ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (part I)]] also makes some good points on how
exceptions can be problematic in systems programming.

My biggest complaint is that while I tend to prefer strongly-typed,
statically-typed languages (and Go is both), I feel like the type
system is also still very limited - particularly, things like the lack
of any parametric polymorphism.  I'd probably prefer something more
like in [[https://www.rust-lang.org][Rust]].  I know this was largely intentional as well: Go was
designed for people who don't want a more powerful type system, but do
want types, and further, to support this kind of polymorphism involves
tradeoffs it looks like they were avoiding, like those Russ Cox gives
in [[https://research.swtch.com/generic][The Generic Dilemma]].  (Later note: the [[https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/go2draft-contracts.md][Contracts - Draft Design]]
proposal for Go 2 offers a possible approach for parametric
polymorphism.)

My objections aren't unique. [[https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/why-i-dont-like-go.html][Ten Reasons Why I Don't Like Golang]] and
[[http://yager.io/programming/go.html][Why Go Is Not Good]] have criticisms I can't really disagree with.
(Also, did you know someone put together
[[https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good][https://github.com/ksimka/go-is-not-good]]?)

All in all, though, Go is a procedural/imperative language with a lot
of good design in language and tooling... which is great, if it's only
procedural/imperative you need.
