Go is a compiled language and Ruby/Python are interpreted scripting languages. There are domains where it's a much more appropriate choice (distributing binaries, performance sensitive code). The type system is also quite nice vs. dynamic typing (in most situations). It's weird to see people comparing Go and Python in this thread as they solve entirely different problems and shouldn't be interchangeable, not due to developer preference but due to fundamental features of the language.
> It's weird to see people comparing Go and Python in this thread as they solve entirely different problems and shouldn't be interchangeable, not due to developer preference but due to fundamental features of the language.
Yes but when Go first came out, a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon and started proposing they would use Go for web applications too. There's definitely some overlap in building web services with Go and Python so I wouldn't say they solve completely different problems.
Go and Python are also pretty related for command line apps too. You could totally use either one to build a CLI tool.
Yeah totally, for using CLI tools I much prefer using a Go binary too because it doesn't involve installing anything.
But in practice as a web developer who occasionally writes CLI scripts, I personally didn't think it was worth going all-in with Go for that.
Especially not when for smaller scripts you can have a Python or Bash script in 1 file[0] and it will run on all major platforms without installing 3rd party libraries too. Most major distros of Linux, MacOS and WSL on Windows have both Python and Bash available. For my use cases that's good enough.
[0]: For example just the other day I released a ~200 line self contained Python script to solve a problem I had which was figuring out what changed between 2 web framework versions: https://github.com/nickjj/verdiff
Given the broad capabilities of the Python first party libraries, you can do a lot of work without 3rd party libraries. It’s not in as much fashion as it was 10+ years ago, but it’s still quite doable.
If you use third party Python libraries, the end user is going to have to install them too. Python really isn't a great language to be building consumer distributed command line apps in.
I think a lot of this discussion is focused around custom software or backend software, but for a publicly distributed binary, Go or any other compiled language is much better than Ruby or Python (and especially Javascript).
Go might be a special case actually, as it was designed to be a "boring" language to reduce the cost of technology choice. But it is completely interchangeable with similar programming languages (like Python) so evaluating the cost of it vs something else is still a very reasonable thing to do.
Go has other problem domains it is appropriate for, but I agree in this domain there is some overlap. Go and Python have very different performance characteristics though, so in that sense they're not really comparable.
It occurs with every execution, if you don’t pre-compile it.
That’s what the .pyc files are. It also does it with the “main” file, but it just keeps that in memory instead of writing it to disk.
