by voodooEntity | 2025-08-22 12:33:00+00:00
As someone who for >10 years writes golang and has written some bigger codebases using it, this are my takes on this articles claims:

:Error variable Scope -> Yes can be confusing at the beginning, but if you have some experience it doesnt really matter. Would it be cool to scope it down?`Sure, but it feels like here is something blown up to an "issue" where i would see other things to alot more important for the go team to revisit. Regarding the error handling in go, some hate it , some love it : i personally like it (yes i really do) so i think its more a preference than a "bad" thing.

:Two types of nil -> Funny, i never encountered this in > 10 years of go with ALOT of work in pointer juggling, so i wonder in which reality this hits your where it cant be avoided. Tho confusing i admit

:It’s not portable -> I have no opinion here since i work on unix systems only and i have my compiled binaries specific shrug dont see any issue here either.

:append with no defined ownership -> I mean... seriously? Your test case, while the results may be unexpected, is a super wierd one. Why you you append a mid field, if you think about what these functions do under the hood your attemp actualyl feels like you WANT to procude strange behaviour and things like that can be done in any language.

:defer is dumb -> Here i 100% agree - from my pov it leads to massive resource wasting and in certain situations it can also create strange errors, but im not motivated to explain this - ill just say defer, while it seems usefull, from my pov is a bad thing and should not be used.

:The standard library swallows exceptions, so all hope is lost -> "So all hope is lost" i mean you already left the realm of objectiveness long before tbut this really tops it. I wrote some quite big go applications and i never had a situation where i could not handle an exception simply by adjusting my code in a way that i prevent it from even happening. Again - i feel like someone is just in search of things to complain that could simply be avoided. (also in case someone comes up with a super specific probably once in a million case, well alrways keep in mind that language design doesnt orient on the least occuring thing).

:Sometimes things aren’t UTF-8 -> I wont bother to read another whole article, if its important include an example. I have dealth with different encodings (web crawler) and i could handle all of them.

:Memory use -> What you describe is one of the design decisions im not absolutly happy with, the memory handling. But than, one of my golang projects is an in memory graph storage/database - which in one of my cases run for ~2years without restart and had about 18GB of dataset stored in it. It has a lot of mutex handling (regarding your earlier complain with exxceptions, never had one) and it btw run as backend of a internet facing service so it wasnt just fed internal data.

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Finally i wanne say : often things come down to personal preference. I could spend days raging about javascript, java, c++ or some other languages, but whatfor? Pick the language that fits your use case and your liking, dont pick one that doesnt and complain about it.

Also , just to show im not just a big "golang is the best" fanboy, because it isnt - there are things to critizize like the previously mentioned memory handling.

While i still think you just created memory leaks in your app, golang had this idea of "arenas" which would enable the code to manage memory partly himself and therefor developt much more memory efficient applications. This has stalled lately and i REALLY hope the go team will pick it up again and make this a stable thing to use. I probably would update all of my bigger codebases using it.

Also - and thats something thats annoying me ALOT beacuse it made me spend alot of hours - the golang plugin system. I wrote an architecture to orchestrate processing and for certain reasons i wanted to implement the orchestrated "things" as plugins. But the plugin system as it is rn can only be described as the torments of hell. I messed with it for like 3 years till i recently dropped the plugin functionality and added the stuff directly. Plugins are a very powerfull thing and a good plugin system could be a great thing, but in its current state i would recommend noone to touch it.

These are just two points, i could list some more but the point i want to get to is : there are real things you can critizize instead of things that you create yourself or that are language design decision that you just dont like. Im not sure if such articles are the rage of someone who just is bored or its ragebait to make people read it. Either way its not helping anyone.