My Honeymoon With Go Is Over

I first got into Go after gravitating around Node.js for a while and I have to say: It was a breath of fresh air. It fixed most of the issues I had with asynchronous code, and it did away with all the fluff, keeping the language simple. I loved it. I loved how simple and predictable it was. And I still do!

I’m just done pretending like it’s perfect. Since then I’ve explored a lot of other things. I got into Deno. I got into Rust. I expanded my horizons. And coming back to Go after that, just brought all of its quirks to the surface. It’s not the perfect language that I was sold. It’s strongly typed… Except for the cases where you can totally get around the type system. We don’t have Enums because we have iota… Except that makes it unnecessarily painful to deal with. There’s plenty of opportunity for nil pointer exceptions, in fact, a lot of code out there is susceptible to nil pointer exceptions, but those aren’t checked because we made a pinky promise that if there’s no error present, the pointer has to be valid… But the compiler doesn’t provide such guarantee.

I still really like Go though. I don’t want this to be a Go-bashing post. I feel very productive in Go, it has an amazing green thread runtime, the GC is pretty darn good and the async primitives are very nice to use. All-in-all it’s still a great language, one that I’ll keep using in the future. I’ve just taken off my pink-tinted glasses.