Go rant

[Sean Kelly]

bearophile Wrote:

> This is a mostly boring rant against the Go language:
> http://monoc.mo.funpic.de/go-rant/
> 
> Near the end it contains an interesting bit:
> >Too, why this divide, again, with reference types and value types? Did they not learn from the problems this caused in Java? While Java slowly struggles its way free of that tarpit, the Go designers leap in headfirst.<
> 
> Can someone here explain me this problem better?

If I had to guess I'd say that he's referring to that fact that value types in Java are second-class citizens.  The standard containers can only hold objects, so boxing is necessary, and that's such a pain in the ass that now boxing is automatic, leading to a lot of hidden allocations.  I wouldn't think this applies to D however.  D is a systems language and so must provide value types to deal with explicit memory layout of structured data, etc.  Also, D uses templates instead of generics, and so doesn't have any of Java's container problems.  I have absolutely no idea how all this applies to Go, however.