Ask HN: Is Go the New Nodejs / JavaScript?

6 points by nikhildaga 10 years ago | 6 comments

Many of the recent top articles on HN are about Go.

Has building apps in Go suddenly become fashionable like it was in node a few years ago?

sargas 10 years ago |

They can compete in the back-end space, but they are good at different things.

Node:

- Great for keeping one language in both back-end and front-end (if you're making a web app). - Has package managers that are battle proof, like npm (which is taking a lot of heat recently due to politics and implementation "issues" that broke peoples builds for 1-2 days). - Is asynchronous by default. Making it a good choice for certain use cases.

Go:

- Great concurrency model - Small language spec, easy to learn and become productive with (this is my opinion) - Single binary build - Great standard library

The fact that Go is getting lots of references in HN might be that it is simply picking up attention, which is normal for any good technology.

Node is also very popular (much more than Go).

Anyways, choosing one over the other seems to be more of a choice on which language you prefer to write in. Unless your use case rules out one of the two.

tmaly 10 years ago |

JavaScript is going to be the leader for a long time. It dominates the client side.

I have noticed a ton of articles on Go. If you are interested on trying Go for a project, I would suggest first doing the Tour of Go then reading Effective Go.

After that, just pick a project or search for some existing code using https://golanglibs.com/search?q=orm here just replace the orm keyword with something your looking for.

Your likely to find something close to what you want 80% of the time. Just clone a project and start hacking away.

makufiru 10 years ago |

Go is more likely to replace Java as high throughput/low latency server technology.

I've seen it in huge companies working with lots of data at high speeds.

Javascript sees a lot of use in small shops where devs only want to learn a few languages, or for fullstack devs who work on both ends of the stack.

You see it a lot in HN because javascript is getting pretty saturated - people are already doing EVERYTHING in it. Go on the other hand is just breaking into a few key areas, and is a lot younger, and I would even go as far as to say more exciting.

cblock811 10 years ago |

I wouldn't put that much weight something showing up on HN a often. Haskel shows up fairly often and it's not close to taking on Node or JS. Will be interesting to watch though.

romanovcode 10 years ago |

Yes. We start to see a pattern of articles mentioning how folks switch from Node to Go and how wonderful it is.

Same articles were popular in 2012, but how they switched from Ruby to Node.

timmm 10 years ago |

No, not even close.