
Ask HN: Alternative to Go - gnur
With all the Go skeptics around on HN (not judging, just an observation), there must be a wealth of knowledge about similar (but &quot;better&quot;) languages.<p>What I like about Go is:
- excellent standard and public libraries
- fast compile times (hot reloading is awesome)
- easy distribution by cross compiling binaries that have no dependencies<p>Is there anything that has similar developer ergonomics as Go?
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randombytes6869
Java meets your requirements. It gets a lot of shit but there's reasons why
its so widely used.

The standard libraries + community are larger than Go, you can find a library
to do anything. Standard library is huge and mostly great.

Compilation time is a couple seconds even for huge projects. You can do
automatic reloads using Gradle.

Its very cross platform, including one of the only good cross platform desktop
UI's.

You can build smaller binary distributions using JLink or a multitude of third
party tools.

Single binaries are overrated. Any app that's widely distributed uses an
installer or package management anyways (brew,choco,apt)

~~~
dcminter
I'm a Java developer, but I take issue with your last point:

"Single binaries are overrated. Any app that's widely distributed uses an
installer [...]"

That's true once you have the kind of traction where distro maintainers are
going to consider packaging it themselves. But to attain that kind of
popularity having a stand-alone binary is going to make a huge difference.

Unless you're willing to build all those packages/installers from scratch!

~~~
karmakaze
My opinion is between these. A single binary is easier, and the java app
deployment could be made better than it is now.

Currently I make an 'uberjar' that includes all java dependencies including
Tomcat/Jetty/etc: java -jar my-app.jar

What's annoying is finding the desired JDK/JRE for each OS with the right
license and manually installing it. Sometimes having to make some file fixes
(e.g. OpenJ9 JDK & Maven compatibility).

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dougbarrett
I've been developing Go web applications for the past 7+ years, some services
getting billions of hits a day, and still have more than a handful running on
various platforms currently.

In the past few days, I've been playing around with Kotlin because a client of
mine is wanting an Android app developed, so I figure this is a good
opportunity to dive right in. I have experience with Spring Java as well, not
as the primary dev of the project, but I've written enough code to be
comfortable with the process.

After being impressed with the process of writing Android apps in Kotlin, I
decided to jump into Spring Boot + Kotlin and have been nothing but impressed.
It's certainly different, but I'm feeling more productive than I was in Go
because I can't say there is anything quite like it available in Go. I've
tried Buffalo, but kept running into issues, and my typical go-to stack is
Echo for the framework and Gorm for the MySQL library, but even then I need to
pick my own tools for auth and caching.

The build time is certainly something to be desired, but with one of the more
basic apps I'm writing for a client right now, it takes just a few seconds to
compile, so it's certainly nothing to complain about at this point.

This is the tutorial I initially followed:
[https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-
kotlin/](https://spring.io/guides/tutorials/spring-boot-kotlin/) and swapping
out the h2 database for mysql was pretty straightforward, and I was pleasantly
surprised to see that I was able to have the app automatically set up the DB
structure for me, similar to how AutoMigrate works with gorm.

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karmakaze
Perhaps Kotlin/Native. I've only used Kotlin which is exceeds my minimum
expressiveness level for a go to default.

I prefer F# but is trickier to set up and less well used/documented/discussed.
OCaml might fit the bill.

~~~
JaggerJo
The F# community is amazingly helpful. Really helped me when I started
learning it..

F# works great for GUIs. Startet that project about a year ago and it’s
gaining traction. Not sure if something like this exists for OCaml ? (If so
please let me know - would love to give it a shot)

[https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/Avalonia.FuncUI](https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/Avalonia.FuncUI)

~~~
karmakaze
This is really cool! Look forward to trying it on my next project.

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mahaganapati
Depends on the use case... I was going to write something in Go the other day
since I hadn't in a while, but instead it was easier to write a bash script.

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Gibbon1
C# is a more mature and complete language than go. And always will be.

Microsoft also appears to be working towards support for gui support for macOS
and linux.

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-
multi-...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-multi-
platform-app-ui/)

~~~
qlk1123
Is the cross compiling flow of C# as transparent as GO?

~~~
Gibbon1
We hired another engineer so I haven't done any work with C# in the last
couple of years. But maybe 5-7 years ago compiled a Windows Forms application
with Xamarin under Linux and it worked with a couple of fixes.

I suspect that given that it's Microsoft if it works it'll just work.

~~~
JaggerJo
consider F#. It’s a joy

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aprdm
C++ is becoming better and better adopting best practices from other
languages. I get it comes with a lot of complexity but I don't see it going
anywhere.

Could be an alternative.

~~~
mraza007
What resources would you suggest to learn or improve C++

~~~
aprdm
I would start with a tour of C++, latest edition is C++18 Iirc and it mentions
things from 2020.

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paktek123
Nim looks very promising

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sigjuice
What hot reloading? Aren't you just restarting processes? That has nothing to
do with Go.

