Re: [OT] Lua community and Go language

[William Ahern <william@...>]

On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 03:08:03PM -0700, Sven Olsen wrote:
> So, I've also dabbled in Go; and would be interested in hearing others'
> impressions of it.

I looked at the Go source code several years ago and ran away in horror. It
made lots of Linux-only assumptions, and had lots of "fix this later"
comments for even the most basic of features which were claimed to be
complete. For a system that was supposedly high-concurrency it's use of
poll() was horrible (and not merely the choice of poll, per se). I'm sure
they support epoll, etc, now, but that wouldn't be encouraging AFAIC.

The larger design of Go is rather nice, particularly its channels
implementation from Plan 9 Limbo (and predecessors). The syntax and other
basic elements, of course, reflect the developers' extreme pragmatism, which
can turn many people off.

But the details are dirty, dirty, dirty, especially compared to Lua. The
Unix/Plan 9 guys are infamous for the "worse is better" motto (not that they
would necessarily own up to it). They take lots of shortcuts based on their
superior knowledge of the existing environment, but which can cause problems
later down the line. It took Unix almost 30 years to become relatively
stable--assumptions break long after people forget the assumptions were
taken.

I wouldn't use Go for anything security related. If hackers take notice it's
going to be bloody for a little while.

That's my opinion, FWIW.