

Ask HN: Should I invest time for learning Go? - diminish

Seeing Google cleanup, anything non-mainstream, do you think it makes sense to invest any time to learn and invest in Go? Could Google pull the plug on it anytime in the future cleanups? If they do, is there enough non-Google momentum for Go to survive?
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phasevar
Go is a tool that Google is using to reduce its development costs. It's not
something they're looking at from a profit perspective. If it does it's job
and makes their development process faster and easier then they have no reason
not to keep supporting it. If it doesn't do its job then it's a clear sign
that you might want to discontinue using it too.

So far, from what I've seen, companies who use it love it.

I think it's a safe bet that it's not going away and will only get better.

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hkarthik
Any Googlers care to chime in on this? I've heard Java and C++ are pretty
entrenched in Google these days so there's a lot of inertia to get people to
try Go for production level work.

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ksherlock
The Go source code is available. Google can stop subsidizing development but
they can't stop development. Even if they do, exposing yourself to new
programming ideas and concepts is generally a good thing.

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lazyjones
Yes, you should.

a) it's very easy to pick up (not an exaggeration). If it's not a good fit for
you, you'll probably know within a week or two.

b) it's fun, especially if you've been knee-deep in script languages for a
while like me and suffered from quirky implementations and buggy code with too
many run-time errors

c) the community is extremely friendly and helpful (OK, anyone could claim
that, but just go look at the google group or the IRC channel and see for
yourself)

d) people actually seem to get stuff done with it, I'm amazed at the quality
of available libraries.

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cryptoz
Learning Go is at the absolute top of my todo list. I went to an intro talk
about Go at Google in Montreal last week and I was flabbergasted. It looks
amazing and I can't wait to write it.

I don't think I understand your concerns about it, though. It's open source.
It's a new evolving paradigm with and language concurrency planned from the
start. At the very least, it will be good for your brain to learn it. And it
has momentum both inside and outside of Google. It's my understanding that
much of YouTube is written in Go.

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CyberFonic
tldr; YES !

You have to recognise the Go was spearheaded by folks who were there from the
earliest days of Unix and Plan9 (used by IBM supercomputers). They know how
not do do things. With all that experience you can accept that they have the
experience to make good decisions. And those decisions are clearly documented
and explained in the various documents.

From a technical side, Go is statically linked. So can cross-compile and not
have to face DLL nor shared library hells. Whilst the resulting binaries are
larger than those that use shared libraries you can have many goroutines
running at once. Each goroutine uses only a small amount of stack space. So
for any production sized project the ease of deployment outweighs any
incremental memory usage. After all, these days 32G or more memory is not
unusual.

On Google AppEngine - Go programs run faster and consume less resources than
comparable programs written in Python and Java. Google is run by some very
smart folks. They are unlikely to be going down a unviable path.

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mergy
Wondering the same

