What do people think about the official Go release?

[Sitwon]

psychic stalker

@Sitwon: I'm thinking of something vaguely reminiscent of Eiffel with syntax like REBOL and functions like Forth.

... With a C-like syntax.

You'll hate it.

Try me. Probably the only way I would "hate" it would be if you used APL-like syntax.

[psychic stalker]

Sitwon

psychic stalker

@Sitwon: I'm thinking of something vaguely reminiscent of Eiffel with syntax like REBOL and functions like Forth.

... With a C-like syntax.

You'll hate it.

Try me. Probably the only way I would "hate" it would be if you used APL-like syntax.

Don't tempt me.

[Sitwon]

psychic stalker

Sitwon

psychic stalker

@Sitwon: I'm thinking of something vaguely reminiscent of Eiffel with syntax like REBOL and functions like Forth.

... With a C-like syntax.

You'll hate it.

Try me. Probably the only way I would "hate" it would be if you used APL-like syntax.

Don't tempt me.

If I have to buy a special typeball to program in your language I will take the train out to your coast and murder you. pirate

[Deeply Disappointed]

Sitwon

The classic "hello, world" example compiles to 1.3MB. Sure it's a statically-linked native binary, but still. 1.3MB. Almost too big to fit on a 3.5" floppy. And to put that in perspective, QNX used to have a demo of their OS with a GUI that would boot off a single 3.5" floppy. This just prints "hello, world" to the console.

(To be fair, the statically-linked C version of "hello, world" comes out to over 800KB when compiled with gcc.)

I don't get why this matters. Go has a runtime which gets included. It's not unlike the glibc case you name, but with more stuff in there. Go, like Java, was never intended to be outputting svelte binaries.

[Sitwon]

Deeply Disappointed

Sitwon

The classic "hello, world" example compiles to 1.3MB. Sure it's a statically-linked native binary, but still. 1.3MB. Almost too big to fit on a 3.5" floppy. And to put that in perspective, QNX used to have a demo of their OS with a GUI that would boot off a single 3.5" floppy. This just prints "hello, world" to the console.

(To be fair, the statically-linked C version of "hello, world" comes out to over 800KB when compiled with gcc.)

I don't get why this matters. Go has a runtime which gets included. It's not unlike the glibc case you name, but with more stuff in there. Go, like Java, was never intended to be outputting svelte binaries.

Oh, I don't think it matters in the sense of "Go is a horrible language because it's too fat" or anything like that. This observation doesn't deter my excitement about Go a single bit.

I just thought it was interesting as in "man, in my day we could fit a whole operating system on a single floppy disk, now even a Hello World would be too big". It's like looking at magazines from the 90s and seeing advertisements for old computer systems with RAM measured in kilobytes and hard drives measured in megabytes. It's just something I hadn't taken the time out to notice before.

However the practical observation from this would be that Go, unlike C, might not be well suited to developing software that targets embedded systems.