This is such a big deal and I wish more people talked about it in these types of blog posts.
I used to be a Python programmer and there were two things that destroyed every project;
- managing Python dependencies
- inability to reason about the input and output types for functions and inability to enforce it ; in Python any function can accept any input value of any type and can return any type of value of any type.
These issues are not too bad if it's a small project and you're the sole developer. But as projects get larger and require multiple developers, it turns into a mess quickly.
Go solved all these issues. Makes deployment so much easier. In all the projects I've done I estimate that more than half have zero dependencies outside of the standard library. And unlike Python, you don't have to "install" Go or it's libraries on the server you plan to run your program on. Fully static self contained executable binary with zero external files needed is amazing, and the fact that you can cross compile for any OS+ CPU arch out of the box on any supported system is a miracle.
The issues described by the original post seem like small potatoes compared to the benefits I've gotten by shifting from Python over to Go
I used to be a Python programmer and there were two things that destroyed every project;
- managing Python dependencies
- inability to reason about the input and output types for functions and inability to enforce it ; in Python any function can accept any input value of any type and can return any type of value of any type.
These issues are not too bad if it's a small project and you're the sole developer. But as projects get larger and require multiple developers, it turns into a mess quickly.
Go solved all these issues. Makes deployment so much easier. In all the projects I've done I estimate that more than half have zero dependencies outside of the standard library. And unlike Python, you don't have to "install" Go or it's libraries on the server you plan to run your program on. Fully static self contained executable binary with zero external files needed is amazing, and the fact that you can cross compile for any OS+ CPU arch out of the box on any supported system is a miracle.
The issues described by the original post seem like small potatoes compared to the benefits I've gotten by shifting from Python over to Go