Is Go popular with indie hackers?
Hi fellow nerds! 😄
For the past five years, I've almost exclusively developed software in the programming language Go. I don't think it gets a lot of mentions in indie hacker circles, and I think that's a shame. It's a very easy language to pick up, it has a great community around it, it's modern and very performant, and the tool ecosystem is a joy to use. On the flipside, the libraries available are sometimes not as mature and plentiful as you would know from Node/JS or Java, but it's growing fast!
There's something about the powerful simplicity in it that makes me think of indie hackers when using it. I'm feel so productive! What about you? Have you tried it? What did you think?
I've decided to build a career around it and cloud computing, doing both consulting for cloud systems written in Go, and now building a course site about learning to build cloud apps in Go. (Links in my profile if you're curious, I don't want to be spammy here.)
Hoping to hear from fellow gophers on IH. 😊
I use Go when I need to write a command line utility or when I need the performance it offers. However, I mainly use Python as my primary language sprinkled with JavaScript thanks to a lot of what I do now being SaaS. When I was more DevOps focused I used a lot more Go.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Now that you know both, do you feel more productive in Python? Or is it because your current stack is in Python?
Personally, I love that I can just use one language for the whole stack, whether I'm building a SaaS app or an API. I don't even evaluate languages anymore, I just use Go also sprinkled with Javascript where I need it.
I mainly use Python more because of its versatility/library support to your point not having to switch languages to do machine learning or web dev or DevOps etc and I am definitely more productive in it for the same library reasons mentioned.
I don't build any apps in Go but I would love to. I have chosen to be pragmatic about my "stack" when building an app which means I lean on what I am most familiar with and that is Python.
That being said, I feel Go's popularity will gradually increase over the coming years. For me, it handles a few things I don't like about Python while having an easy syntax to understand.
In the workplace - particularly event-driven/cloud-native/microservices, etc. I think that is where it is really going to shine. The deployment is much easier than python for most decently sized companies. Its portability is great too - just build the package and send it.
In all, I really want to use it but am not right now - I keep saying if I build an API first app it is going to be a Go project but haven't thought of one yet!
Awesome to see you're using it though.
It makes perfect sense to just use what you know. Definitely keep doing that, Python is a great language for a lot of things! I've done a good deal of Python myself.
And I agree that in the cloud is really where Go shines. That, and CLIs.
We use Go to build https://pirsch.io/ and I used it for the past five years for a range of projects (maybe even longer?). It's a fantastic language, easy to use, easy to pick up, easy to test.
I don't think the libraries are not mature. The standard library is fantastic and sufficient for smaller projects and the open-source libs I found are mostly high-quality, especially if you compare them to JS libs.
I definitely recommend it for startups or to build a career!
I definitely didn’t mean to say that there are no mature libs in Go. There are plenty! But compared to more high-level things like everything-for-user-auth (signups/login with password resets, social integration) as an example, there are more batteries-included libs in other languages.
True. Personally, I think it's a good thing there are no "god" frameworks like Spring or Lavarel for Go. While they can be very useful, they also imply a certain programming paradigm. I have a Java background and never liked how Spring forced me to think about programming. But this is more of a personal issue than an argument against them really.
Yeah, definitely. I like the mix-and-match approach more than one-framework-to-rule-them-all. But sometimes, a higher abstraction level would be nice, especially for the things I need in almost every web app I build.
I have been thinking about Go for a while.
Problem is I have half an existing project that is in PHP.
Keep the PHP! Try out Go on a small new project when one comes along instead. 😊
I can imagine using Go for few specific projects, but for most of the work no.
I did try it like a year back for evaluation and that language doesn't click for me at all. I am also not fan of tabs :).
Sometimes it just doesn't click. 😊