little question about Golang

[unique bramble]

Hi all, is it true that Golang is a very high performance and versatile language? Is it possible to write a server, a driver, a game, an operating server, a neural network in this language?

[scenic compass]

i mean it's possible to do all of those in any language technically

i dont think you would want to write an operating system in go for various reasons

other more data-driven languages might be easier for neural networks

i think c# or c++ might be easier to write a game in, given the existing ecosystems (though ebiten exists)

but for servers and drivers, go would be a fine choice

[unique bramble]

ty

[unique bramble]

how stable is the syntax? and what can you say about the performance of golang and with its gc pauses? if I have no desire to learn rust or c for system programming, can I program in golang?

[civic bolt]

The syntax is entirely stable. There is a compatibility guarantee.

The GC pauses are minimal. I've had much bigger GC issues in C#.

That said, they do exist.

Let's not pretend GC is free 😉

[unique bramble]

@civic bolt , ok, but how good is golang? what language can it be compared to?

[civic bolt]

"good" is both subjective and context dependent.
Comparisons require comparison criteria.

For example, Go is less verbose than Java. I think that is good.

[unique bramble]

What can you say about the performance of the language Golang if you put C, Cpp, Rust next to it?

[civic bolt]

I can tell you that my Go is a lot more performant than my C++.
Not because Go is inherently faster, but because I suck at C++.

Benchmarks show that given a good programmer, C and Rust are usually faster than Go, but given my relatively smooth brain, I'm unlikely to ever get competent at C, and my Rust is still very lacking.

I think picking a language for it's end-result performance is premature optimalization. You have a lot of hurdles to clear in a project long before you get the sort of performance that makes the language important.

For the average web service that sees a couple hundred thousand hits a day? Yeah, no, you'll lose a lot more of your performance writing dodgy SQL queries than you will for picking Go over Rust.