Ever since running my first line of Go code in production, I've found it hard to engage in serious engineering debates with “developers of other languages.”
It's not that their languages are inadequate. Node.js offers hot reloading and a thriving ecosystem; Java delivers impressive throughput and mature middleware; Rust is sharp enough to command respect. But when the conversation turns to predictable delivery, stable latency, and a simple yet reliable concurrency model, I can't help but recall the clean, static single-file output of `go build`, the thousands of goroutines silently shuttling through the scheduler, and the reassuring sense of the standard library quietly handling 80% of the work.
While they passionately debate the agility of “hot deployment” and “scaffolding,” I just shrug: a few seconds of compilation yields a monolithic binary deployed in one go—cross-platform, replicable, zero external dependencies, just toss it into a container and it runs. While they argued fiercely over the “coroutine model,” I thought of goroutine + channel's CSP semantics—not masking blocking as asynchronous, but making concurrency predictable communication again. When they praised a runtime's “controllable memory strategy,” I cared more about escape analysis and the evolution curve of low-latency GC, and that moment when a pprof flame graph nailed the p99.
I tried to fit in. But while they were busy assembling layer upon layer of frameworks and scaffolding, I'd already spun up a service with net/http, integrated timeouts and cancellations with context, and swept through potential hazards with go test and race detector. While they marvel at “vast ecosystems and countless wheels,” I simply say: the standard library should cover 80% of scenarios. For the remaining 20%, a small, elegant module with stable APIs pulled via `go get` suffices—fewer components mean easier maintenance and more reliable deployment.
This isn't arrogance, but restraint born of experience. When you personally compile a service from the main function to production, pack logging, metrics, tracing, and rate limiting/circuit breaking into a single image under 100MB, and observe, roll out, roll back, and scale horizontally with complete predictability—you'll understand: engineering peace of mind comes from simplicity, restraint, and certainty, not flashy syntax or complex magic.
Go is certainly not a silver bullet. But once you've grown accustomed to writing concurrency like sequential code, deploying by copying files, and confronting performance issues head-on with flame graphs—it's hard to go back.
So I politely say, “Any tech stack is fine.”
Yet deep down, that voice remains calm and resolute:
“Sorry, you haven't experienced engineering simplicity and certainty yet.”
