Go stays winning.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

Go stays winning. Wanna deploy your app?

1. Copy the binary.

That's it. You're done.*

* - Assuming the database is SQLite or there is no database.

[ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club]

@swelljoe I've been making this case on my team for why we shouldn't develop in Python anymore, and they have been very patient but I think deep down they think I'm insane

(But legit I'm not too fussed with language specifics now and am on a big "But what are the deployment/runtime characteristics of whatever you write, assuming we're smart enough to write anything in any language that isn't Brainfuck" arc)

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@ludicity deploying large mostly Python (but also Node.js, and others) apps in a ridiculous variety of places has been a huge part of my job for the past...well, forever, and I'm really good at it. I'm the person everyone asks for help when they can't make it work and when ChatGPT can't make it work.

All of my web projects for the past two years or so are in Go, and I'm slowly migrating old stuff to Go, too. The deployment story alone is enough to make it worth the effort.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@ludicity it's just a bonus that it's an order of magnitude faster, has a standard library that's so good you barely need anything else (and what you do bring in from third party libs is mostly made by grownups who write clear, concise, no bullshit, code), and has a memory footprint that's dramatically smaller.

It's such a low bullshit language, I can't imagine using anything else for web services and web app backends.

[genehack@dementedandsadbut.social]

@swelljoe @ludicity to be fair, Rust kinda has this same deployment story. I agree it's a huge selling point, but also, if you're deploying true lambdas to AWS, you also kinda get this for any supported runtime? (N.b., not "run a container as a lambda", like ...actual old school Lambdas.)

[genehack@dementedandsadbut.social]

@swelljoe @ludicity all that said, yes, if deployment process was a primary concern (and ...when is it not?), I would put up with a moderate to large amount of shite to get Go's deployment story.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@genehack @ludicity I'm willing to believe it, but I've struggled quite a bit with Rust. To be fair to Rust, I've been dealing with it in a desktop app context, and I may have made poor choices (I switched from Qt to Slint for a C++ app because I thought maybe it'd be nicer to build and package, but Slint is also a nightmare). I've never built a web app in Rust, but maybe I'll give it a go at some point. The build times are pretty gnarly though. Go builds much faster than most Node.js apps.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@genehack @ludicity the good news is there's very little shit in Go, IMHO. It's a simple-ish language missing some fancy features, but it's not missing anything I really feel the loss of, especially for the simple problems I'm making web apps for.

Of course, as much as I like it, I'm not using it for anything other than web stuff. Even my current large-ish Go project has as much Python for the data import tools, just because it was easier to write and deploy/performance don't matter.

[genehack@dementedandsadbut.social]

@swelljoe (droping Lucidity from this thread of our chat)

maybe this is where i should unfurl my "not a huge Rust stan, have just played a little and it seems _fine_" flag...

i wonder if there's an incremental build versus from-scratch build penalty you're running into; i also wonder if it's just the Rust "we check more shit up front so you pay a compile-time tax for that" thing.

Node build times are ...not what that ecosystem optimizes for.

[genehack@dementedandsadbut.social]

@swelljoe @ludicity Personally, I have found Go to to be the blue Oxford/khaki pants of language choices. It's __FINE__ but it does not spark any joy in my coder heart.

At one point I read a Rob Pike interview where he said something like, "Google was hiring a lot of college grads who only knew C++ and we needed to limit the damage they could cause, so we invented Go" (paraphrased) and that really resonated with my experiences with the language... it tries to meld productivity with some limits

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@genehack I don't know what the Node ecosystem optimizes for. It seems pretty sub-optimal across the board.

But, also, my C++ and Rust project has an 18GB debug build directory for a tiny little application, and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

[swelljoe@mas.to]

@genehack yeah, I was very slow to come around, because it sounded a lot like the pitch for Java from a decade prior and I fancy myself a clever programmer. I'm the kind of programmer that thinks Perl is pretty neat because of TIMTOWTDI. But, I dunno. Once I tried it, I was hooked pretty fast. Turns out I'd rather everything be easy and fast and small without even trying, even if sometimes the code is a bit verbose. For me, the cost is low and the reward is huge.