One of my engineering highlights was Russ reviewing a few of my contributions to Golang (to the core http library). He's a super cool and nice guy. I don't really write that much Go anymore, but it was a fun & cute language when it first came out.
I love these release notes but I really wish they would add syntax highlighting to the Go blog. I'm always a little bit surprised/disappointed whenever I land on a go.dev link since I know the code will be just a little harder to visually parse than it needs to be.
There's a reason for this. Rob Pike was asked about it and said that syntax highlighting reminds him of the bright colors of children's toys and he personally disables it so that he can focus on the text.
I don't know why it's still like that but that's the original reasoning.
> Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught
arithmetic using colored rods
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods). I grew up and today I
use monochromatic numerals.
That makes sense as a personal preference for him, but it's odd for that to still be the company/project stance. Like, surely he knows he's the minority for not wanting highlighting?
that's an extremely odd explanation and it makes me think that he has some hidden PTSD. it's also insane that one person's preference trumps the rest of the world's.
I love how proactive the crypto team is about post quantum. They released https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/mldsa. The lead maintainer Filippo Valsorda wrote a nice piece here[1] to urge the tech world to start deploying good enough versions of post quantum crypto.
While I'm highly sympathetic to competing priorities crowding out movement to pq cryptography. At the same time it's not sudden at all. It's been 10 years since nist first said "move shit over"?
Unfortunately for people SELECTing UUIDs out of a DB directly into a uuid struct, the built-in uuid structs don't implement the necessary interface for that, so you'll have to continue using the google package, or a plain string.
The database/sql package gained native support[1] for the uuid.UUID type so it will Just Work even without the methods. This probably should have been mentioned in the release notes and database/sql package docs.
> First, generic methods are now supported
> Generic functions can now be used without explicit type arguments
Great! This was an ergonomic code issue I hit when trying to create a universal handler/controller generic that could hydrate/populate function arguments (from a request body) without having an actual copy of the arguments: https://github.com/xeoncross/mid/blob/main/handler.go#L12
> Second, a key in a struct literal may now be any valid field selector for the struct type, allowing fields in nested or embedded structs to be initialized directly
It's been a while since I've written more than anything trivial in golang, but this seems like a big deal to me. As in, I can define a struct that is consistent and reusable in other structs
It will be very nice working with code generators like oapi-codegen that can generate either nested structs or very unwieldy struct names. So big in that context, but like you said just a nice qol improvement most of the time.
You might want to follow this proposal, if you aren't already. It's the most recent one, and it's supported by quite a few “core members” of the Go Team. I don't think it'll land in 1.28, but I like the fact that it's still a feature that's being actively discussed.
This is only a small piece of the story for what people say when they want tagged unions. Without all of the ancillary support in the language, like exhaustive pattern matching, it really doesn't count.
That is a LOT of code (very ugly code, I would add) that could be replaced by `type Float = float32 | float64` in a language with actual support for union types.
Tagged unions are not union types. A union type is a supertype for any arbitrary collection of types, but a tagged union aka sum type is a single type with multiple data constructors, and does not require subtyping to be implemented.
The C++ committee said the same thing, and gave us std::variant. They are painful to work with and do not really deliver most of the benefits people want.
Go is extremely easy to pickup. If you know any language you probably know Go already for the most part (channels notwithstanding).
I wouldn't say it is a "beautiful" language however. Though that is in the eye of the beholder, I don't think the Go designers were even really going for beauty.
They were going for readability. You can make some impossible to read code with C++ because the programmer was too clever, and the designers of golang wanted to avoid that.
Agreed. I've recently translated a pangram generator project written in Rust [1] leveraging SIMD to do the same in Go [2] to see how it fairs in terms of speed - the results are pretty close. In my local machine I'm getting ~3GHz in Rust vs ~2.4GHz in Go, which I think is really impressive.
I'm so glad the new uuid package landed - it's overdue but a very welcome addition! I've already replaced github.com/google/uuid with `uuid` in several projects
I like to imagine that one day we'll have a language that launched with all the features languages eventually add. The whole ecosystem of packages would be built on them instead of a legacy of more primitive language feature sets.
I mean one thing frontier models are really good at is porting code with pretty low level of supervision. Provided there are enough fans porting packages from other ecosystems should not be a big challenge.
I love Go because even minor versions deliver great value like this. The struct literal inits and generic methods are great conveniences to clean up clumsy boilerplate.
Not to mention it’s just a dream language to work with , especially when building concurrent applications. I love engaging all of my cores. And memory is so expensive nowadays
Minor versions are basically major versions for Go. They’ll “never” create a Go v2 because they prioritise maintaining backwards compatibility as a language feature, thus following semver rules, no majors.
Being on the HN's homepage isn't as simple as "most upvoted articles in last X hours". They take into account upvote velocity: 40 upvotes in 40 minutes isn't the same as 40 upvotes in 4 yours.
Would you rather have yet another LLM-generated slop article in its place instead of an article covering a major release for a widely-used language? Out of all the articles that reach the HN front page, this is the one you have a problem with?
Wasn't Go supposed to be "simple"? I remember how Go advocates used to boast about not having generics and now it almost seems like Go is trying to become some sort of C# or Java Frankenstein. I'm not even trying to badmouth Golang - just legitimately confused.
https://research.swtch.com/fp
https://github.com/golang/go/blob/go1.27.0/src/internal/strc...
I don't know why it's still like that but that's the original reasoning.
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
[1] https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/
ssh (as noted in tfa) has had pq defaults since 2022.
It seems there's a big push happening behind the scenes.
Kubernetes project will be the first one [3] I guarantee it.
[1] https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/google/uuid
[2] https://go.dev/pkg/uuid
[3] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/2220c3853a2402...
[4] https://github.com/google/uuid/issues/221
[1] https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.27.0:src/...
Great! This was an ergonomic code issue I hit when trying to create a universal handler/controller generic that could hydrate/populate function arguments (from a request body) without having an actual copy of the arguments: https://github.com/xeoncross/mid/blob/main/handler.go#L12
It's been a while since I've written more than anything trivial in golang, but this seems like a big deal to me. As in, I can define a struct that is consistent and reusable in other structs
I do still wish it had discriminated unions (algebraic data types) and some better error handling ergonomics.
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76920
You might want to follow this proposal, if you aren't already. It's the most recent one, and it's supported by quite a few “core members” of the Go Team. I don't think it'll land in 1.28, but I like the fact that it's still a feature that's being actively discussed.
https://github.com/splizard/tagged
I wouldn't say it is a "beautiful" language however. Though that is in the eye of the beholder, I don't think the Go designers were even really going for beauty.
Sure a SIMD expert writing assembly can probably do a better job than an LLM using these new intrinsics, but it’s still massively faster.
[1]: https://github.com/tuzz/pangram-machine
[2]: https://github.com/nkanaev/pangram-machine-go
I like to imagine that one day we'll have a language that launched with all the features languages eventually add. The whole ecosystem of packages would be built on them instead of a legacy of more primitive language feature sets.
Standard ML is a perfect programming language from the 90s. It unfortunately does not have a great eco system of packages.
The `go fix` modernisers are also great, have already run them in several repos.
Not to mention it’s just a dream language to work with , especially when building concurrent applications. I love engaging all of my cores. And memory is so expensive nowadays
It sounds like the dumbest thing in the world, but I love the import system auto-adding stuff inside of vscode when I need it. just slick.
The tl;dr boils down to a combination of valuing both compilation speed and execution speed.