Hector Martin

i'm programming in Go now it feels like they've mashed the worst parts of C and Javascript syntax together, with the package dependency hell of early-2010s Ruby, and the elitist community of early-2000s Linux fanboys oh, and Google owns it

Don't forget the garbage collector from Java and the static linking of... 70s UNIX? Though, having worked at Google, I can see how it works for *them* in some contexts :-)

giving me a static binary i don't need to worry about is the only thing i, an amateur who doesn't write programs, like about Go

Static binaries are great for toy projects or for companies like Google who recompile and redeploy everything constantly. For everyone else, they are a huge security liability as dependencies get linked in and never updated. Patching a dependency means updating *all* dependents.

you also can't statically link the entire world. eventually you must be dynamically linking, in a sense, to the OS kernel's syscall interface now, on Linux you have Linus who promises to keep that extremely stable, so it works however… Windows and macOS are not Linux.

a reasonable individual would conclude, okay, we'll make an exception to dynamically linking just for these OSes, and link to the OS's userland dynamic library that handles kernel stuff and which does have a stable interface however that reasonable individual is not the Go devs

Go tried to hardcode syscalls on macOS anyway. Then they broke the gettimeofday interface and all Go apps exploded. The other issue is that Go's C FFI is slow (and buggy and convoluted), and they have to use it for syscalls on those platforms, with worse results.

So Go *does* dynamically link with C libs in the end on those platforms, but that entire feature sucks.