I just went back to Scala from Go for a personal project I've been working on, and I have to say I don't miss Go. I feel much more productive in Scala, and my code seems just solid that it ever did in Go.
To be specific, six things still bug me about Go.
Error handling: For goodness sake, the solution to error handling in Go is to go back to the C model? I hated how all my Go code was riddled with "if value, err := somefunction(); err != nil". After decades of software development, the best solution for Go seems to be to give up. Scala 2.10, on the other hand, added Try(), which is a beautiful solution for error handling without trashing your happy-path code.
Project management: I don't want to keep all my projects in a single repository. And I don't really trust the master branch of github.com projects to be stable, nor do I want to rely on the fact that I need to update my software right now because someone has changed the interface to their library. This may work for a walled garden like Google, but it strikes me as a bit dangerous long term for the rest of us. Maven, SBT and Gradle aren't perfect, but I like the fact that I have a little more control over my dependencies and build processes.
Concurrency: Go is great for local concurrency, but there doesn't seem to be a good distributed concurrency framework. And the way they've modeled local concurrency, there never will be. You can't use shared memory for distributed concurrency without some really big tricks. Scala + Akka is like the best of Erlang with the libraries of Java, and it can work locally or remotely.
SQL support: It's miserable in Go. No control over pooling (limited to 2 connections?), and the driver has weird restrictions. I think they've fixed it for the next release, but there was a problem where you could only have one prepared statement per connection. That sort of defeats the purpose of prepared statements. I don't think SQL is a big priority at Google, so the effort towards the drivers is nowhere near the Javaland support. I'm no Hibernate fan, but at least the JDBC drivers work extremely well for most databases.
Testing: I feel like the test framework for Go is weak. Maybe it's because not as much testing is required, but I still like to be thorough. For example, no setup and teardown functionality (you have roll your own per method). My test cases in ScalaTest are more far complete and consistent, with solid output and better support for CI.
Third-party libraries: This is somewhat akin to my complaint about SQL support, but the libraries for attaching to other services don't feel as stable in Go, and there are so few of them. I realize this is a short-term problem, but is there any way Go can catch up to Java at this point, particularly with so many companies behind many of these libraries?
To be specific, six things still bug me about Go.
Error handling: For goodness sake, the solution to error handling in Go is to go back to the C model? I hated how all my Go code was riddled with "if value, err := somefunction(); err != nil". After decades of software development, the best solution for Go seems to be to give up. Scala 2.10, on the other hand, added Try(), which is a beautiful solution for error handling without trashing your happy-path code.
Project management: I don't want to keep all my projects in a single repository. And I don't really trust the master branch of github.com projects to be stable, nor do I want to rely on the fact that I need to update my software right now because someone has changed the interface to their library. This may work for a walled garden like Google, but it strikes me as a bit dangerous long term for the rest of us. Maven, SBT and Gradle aren't perfect, but I like the fact that I have a little more control over my dependencies and build processes.
Concurrency: Go is great for local concurrency, but there doesn't seem to be a good distributed concurrency framework. And the way they've modeled local concurrency, there never will be. You can't use shared memory for distributed concurrency without some really big tricks. Scala + Akka is like the best of Erlang with the libraries of Java, and it can work locally or remotely.
SQL support: It's miserable in Go. No control over pooling (limited to 2 connections?), and the driver has weird restrictions. I think they've fixed it for the next release, but there was a problem where you could only have one prepared statement per connection. That sort of defeats the purpose of prepared statements. I don't think SQL is a big priority at Google, so the effort towards the drivers is nowhere near the Javaland support. I'm no Hibernate fan, but at least the JDBC drivers work extremely well for most databases.
Testing: I feel like the test framework for Go is weak. Maybe it's because not as much testing is required, but I still like to be thorough. For example, no setup and teardown functionality (you have roll your own per method). My test cases in ScalaTest are more far complete and consistent, with solid output and better support for CI.
Third-party libraries: This is somewhat akin to my complaint about SQL support, but the libraries for attaching to other services don't feel as stable in Go, and there are so few of them. I realize this is a short-term problem, but is there any way Go can catch up to Java at this point, particularly with so many companies behind many of these libraries?