Comment by stouset

Comment by stouset a day ago

10 replies

With all due respect, there are many languages in popular use that can do this, in many cases better than golang.

I believe it’s the only system you know. But it’s far from the only one.

antonchekhov a day ago

> there are many languages in popular use that can do this, in many cases better than golang

I'd love to see a list of these, with any references you can provide.

  • Jtsummers a day ago

    Erlang, Elixir, Ada, plenty of others. Erlang and Ada predate Go by several decades, too.

    You wanted sources, here's the chapter on tasks and synchronization in the Ada LRM: http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22rm/html/RM-9.html

    For Erlang and Elixir, concurrent programming is pretty much their thing so grab any book or tutorial on them and you'll be introduced to how they handle it.

  • jose_zap a day ago

    Haskell would be one of them. It features transactional memory, which frees the programmer from having to think about explicitly locking.

ibic a day ago

Please elaborate or give some examples to back your claim?

dismalaf a day ago

There's not that many. C/C++ and Rust all map to OS threads and don't have CSP type concurrency built in.

In Go's category, there's Java, Haskell, OCaml, Julia, Nim, Crystal, Pony...

Dynamic languages are more likely to have green threads but aren't Go replacements.

  • Jtsummers a day ago

    > There's not that many.

    You list three that don't, and then you go on to list seven languages that do.

    Yes, not many languages support concurrency like Go does...

    • dismalaf a day ago

      And of those seven, how many are mainstream? A single one...

      So it's really Go vs. Java, or you can take a performance hit and use Erlang (valid choice for some tasks but not all), or take a chance on a novel paradigm/unsupported language.

      • Jtsummers a day ago

        If you want mainstream, Java and C# are mainstream and both are used much more than Go. Clojure isn't too niche, though not as popular as Go, and supports concurrency out of the box at least as well as Go. Ada is still used widely within its niches and has better concurrency than Go baked in since 1983. And then, yes, Erlang and Elixir to add to that list.

        That's 6 languages, a non-exhaustive list of them, that are either properly mainstream and more popular than Go or at least well-known and easy to obtain and get started with. All of which have concurrency baked in and well-supported (unlike, say, C).

        EDIT: And one more thing, all but Elixir are older than Go, though Clojure only slightly. So prior art was there to learn from.

      • [removed] a day ago
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  • jen20 a day ago

    Erlang (or Elixir) are absolutely Go replacements for the types of software where CSP is likely important.

    Source: spent the last few weeks at work replacing a Go program with an Elixir one instead.

    I'd use Go again (without question) but it is not a panacea. It should be the default choice for CLI utilities and many servers, but the notion that it is the only usable language with something approximating CSP is idiotic.