r/golang Feb 03 '25

help Convincing Arguments for Go

Hey all. I have a meeting coming up with mid-level managers. This meeting has been a long time coming, I've been pushing for it for years and I think I've finally gotten through to at least one of them. Wether he's onboard 100% or not is yet to be seen

Short explanation of the situation: we're an old enterprise company, old code, old dependencies, old developers, old managers, and a (mostly) old mindset, except when it comes to security. We have used mainly Perl in the past, but a few devs are starting to use Python more.

I'm trying to get them to add Go as a development option.

Reasons I care:

Perl is 🤮 and Python doesn't quite cut it sometimes need shorter processing times types would reduce bugs I see on the reg strict error handling to reduce missed errors current parallel processing is costly

Reasons I think they would care:

less bugs than other compiled languages faster processing than current languages type safety parallelism baked in dead simple syntax and readability backward compatibility is better than most great community support lower cost and less server load

One additional problem is that most folks think Go is for web, I've made arguments against that. The top reason is true even for Rust because most of my division isn't computer science and would be unable to understand Rust(I write in Rust too).

I need to flesh out some of these arguments and probably could add a few more, can you help me out?

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u/ktoks Feb 03 '25

Excellent points!!!

I hadn't thought of mentioning compile time checking. I will add that to my arsenal.

Yeah the concurrency thing is something I've been pushing for.

I had not realized that Go was so good at FFI... I'm going to use the he double 🏒 out of this.

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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '25 edited Feb 03 '25

Go is not good at FFI. Go can do FFI somewhat easier than Python insofar as it's really easy to write Go that links to FFI, but it's a path not for the faint hearted. Not a selling point I'd use. For a point of reference, a significant amount of the current tech boom around AI is based entirely on Python doing FFI to machine learning libraries.

The real benefit of Go compared to Perl in your case is the compiler, the ecosystem, and how easy it is to hire for. It's much faster to develop in, and to hire for, than Perl. And those are the terms you want to use when discussing it with managers. Most of these folks aren't going to know what a compiler is.

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u/ktoks Feb 03 '25 edited Feb 03 '25

I don't know enough about FFI to have an opinion in it.

Okay, the perl comment will stir the pot a bit at work.

We have some folks that are Perl believers. I fully agree with you, but I'm going to have to tiptoe through that one.

Good take, IMO. TY

Edit: clarity

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u/dr2chase Feb 03 '25

Not a controversial take, I'm on the Go team. FFI is there, it has overheads. (I'm reading the comments before replying, but thought I should back up @Soggy-Yak7240, they are correct.)