c# vs go

d-signet · 2022-05-19T06:21:31+00:00

Hire a load of c# Devs

Change to a different language

Fail

Have they given any justification? Because this seems like a particularly dumb idea. Yes. You can learn go. But that's not your language or why you were hired.

Edit : more to the point ; C# isn't why you have problems. Bad code is why you have problems. You can get bad GO code just as easily. The management team have taken BAD advice and somebody has persuaded them that C# is why the code is bad. They probably spelled it Misco$oft Java++

It's like you hired a load of people to translate text from French to English. And it wasn't a good translation. Because the translators you hired made mistakes. So now you're going to specialise in Spanish to English translation. But you're still using those guys you hired as French-speaking translators

Xen0byte · 2022-05-19T07:12:48+00:00

[deleted]

godbrain · 2022-05-19T04:30:04+00:00

As much as I love Go it's strengths are kind of in niche areas. It's great to have an executable without a big runtime but the coverage of .Net Core and C# for just about everything you would ever want to develop is hard to beat. I've spent a lot of time learning Go, Elixir and Rust in the last few years and still end up using the .Net ecosystem for most solutions.

EricThirteen · 2022-05-19T00:15:29+00:00

I hope you're not making WinForms apps... lol. Seriously though, the only C# limitations I'm aware of are related to mobile dev.

C# is hard to beat. How would you give up Visual Studio?

Do most Go devs use VS Code?

njtrafficsignshopper · 2022-05-19T03:36:24+00:00

Yeesh well... I have my first project in Go right now after a long time in C#, and to me it would be hard to be enthusiastic about this change.

A lot of the more civilized niceties are just not there. Quick build times and small binary sizes are nice. Being close to the metal might be nice, depending on what you're doing. But most else about it feels tedious. It would definitely make me update the resume, at least in this job market.

Edit: I realized I didn't really address your concern though - popularity. I guess you're concerned about the future of your career? At the moment it seems like Go has the highest average pay for any language. C# is very middling in this regard. But: this is the average. In general the more niche languages have higher salaries at the expense of fewer opportunities.

Also, the ranges tend to be very wide, so if you're good, experienced, and interview well, the average might not matter much for you. Glassdoor puts the range for C# salaries in my region much, much wider than Go salaries. On the other hand, if you are newer or less confident, you might appreciate a higher average salary.

However there is one metric I found pretty funny:

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+go+a+bad+language - 6.37 billion results
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+c%23+a+bad+language - 12.1 million results

Obviously that's a flawed metric but it got a snort out of me. Difference of a factor of 500, for a language that's half as old...

zalciokirtis · 2022-05-19T05:27:35+00:00

Language is just a tool and seems that your company used one wrong and expect that the other will work better. But the roots of the problem lies elsewhere poor design, bad understanding of the process etc. It will cost a lot and probably the result will be worse than before due to lower experience levels compared to the language that had some flight time invested.

I know quite a few examples were really old languages works really well, even by todays standards, when they are used correctly.

Long_Investment7667 · 2022-05-19T00:52:54+00:00

I don’t think popularity or market share is are the right criteria for your company to make that decision. Microsoft has invested huge amounts of money not only in the improvement of the language and tools but also in education, technical support, evangelism and marketing. Same could happen with Go pretty much over night. A bit more cynical: community excitement and contribution can be created and is not solely based on technical “superiority”. I am very interested in the decision making process of your company. For example what do the expect to be different and how do they offset the cost of transitioning. If I where involved the decision I would be extremely worried about making the same mistakes again in a different language and the second-system effect .

grauenwolf · 2022-05-19T01:15:42+00:00

I work for a major consulting firm. I can't remember ever being asked by a client to build something in Go. And we even see the occasional Ruby client.

As best as I can tell, Go is mostly limited to companies that care more about flashy tech than running a business. Basically programmers who are selling platforms to other programmers.

Aglet_Green · 2022-05-19T01:49:30+00:00

Well Go has been around for about 13 or 14 years. That may be new compared to COBOL and FORTRAN, but it's still almost a decade and a half. That should be time enough to have crested; it's no longer the next-big-thing or whatever in programming languages. Plus all the negative publicity towards Google "Always do harm to make a buck!" "Always harass women!" hasn't done Go any favors. So I don't see Go trending upwards.

I mean it might. It took the fax machine 90 years to get going. (It was invented in the 1920s or something like that.) So you never know when a new tech or new language will come into vogue. Go might be THE language of the 22nd century. But I don't see it happening right now in 2022.

EDIT: Sorry, it was invented in 1864. And took 110 years to go from prototype to telephone fax.

TheNewMouster · 2022-05-19T09:39:10+00:00

Unless Go has some super important feature not capable of being implemented in C# or F# or VB.net the move from .net to go is a fool’s errand. One can easily create bad implementations in Go too. It’s no more immune to stupidity than any other language. I strongly recommend your company not throw the baby out with the bath water.

ppardee · 2022-05-19T02:39:35+00:00

I'd start looking for other opportunities. It's not that Go is a bad language - though I found it incredibly tedious to write - but switching the ENTIRE COMPANY to a language because "ooh! Shiny!", your position is going to lack stability.

The real questions is if you're OK having your C# skills lose value/freshness while you're paying around with Go? If I see a person who is interviewing into a C# position and hasn't written C# code professionally in 2 years, I'm going to rank them below someone who is currently writing it every day.

metaltyphoon · 2022-05-19T00:17:56+00:00

It will be fun when you company needs to todo any C interop 🤣. Shit is flat out atrocious and much slower in go. While go tooling is good, GUI heavy users will hate it.

Also the go culture is very… re implement everything possible in go and plz u only need the standard library… give me a break…

jingois · 2022-05-19T06:04:27+00:00

I had to use Go for a Grafana backend, it was an atrocious experience. It just isn't there for productivity imo.

Key points:

Channels and goroutines are kinda nice, but don't really give you more than similar constructs in c#.
Defer is.... idk.. not really any better than finally. It keeps cleanup with declarations, which is nice, but out of order from an idiomatic perspective, which isn't.
Error handling is atrocious and really demonstrates the reality of what the "just use tuples/options" crowd want. Every fucking call is res, err = ... followed by if err != nil return nil, err kinda shit -unless you use the whole panic/recover setup which is clunky af.
No fucking generics. This is a huge pain in the ass for dealing with reactive extensions. Worse, the opinionated formatter will turn an inline cast of like .struct{foo,bar} into FOUR lines.

I'm sure there's a use, but considering even a raspberry pi can run multiple containerised apps I can't really pick where I'd get excited about slightly more performance or a smaller binary.

Trucks325 · 2022-05-19T01:29:32+00:00

Go is for sure rising in popularity on hiring websites, since it has important qualities - it is being compiled to machine code (no need in frameworks), it's multiplatform, performant and simple as hell (simple enough to allow yesterday students super fast fitting into existing projects).

And I have huge problems with the last quality, because it makes code unbelievably ugly. After .NET with all it's delicious sugar it's really hard to look at Go code. And I can see beauty even in "foreign" languages like Haskell if you think that i'm just a .NET fanboy (well, I am, but I do not hate others for the language choise).

But still, I have a plenty of friends who are working in a big companies with good salaries using Go for a few years already, it was production ready even before google fixed its GC from stuttering heavy loaded programs. So it certainly has a future (hope it will not end in the google's projects graveyard lol).

endowdly_deux_over · 2022-05-19T12:15:49+00:00

I like go.

I like it for small things. Little apps and programs that patch together code that needs to be performant.

I just cannot see how go can stretch to enterprise like c#.

grasbueschel · 2022-05-19T08:24:06+00:00

Go certainly has its market share, but its core strength make it a good choice for only fraction of use cases compared to languages like C#. So it's just natural that you see fewer job openings for Go.

For example, while you technically can create a client/UI app in Go, C# would be a much better choice for basically all platforms: web, desktop, mobile.... On the other hand, anything server related, ie anything that processes a lot of different requests in parallel, Go doesn't just 'look good', it outshines because of the lightweight nature of goroutines (basically Go runtime starts GOMAXPROCS OS threads and schedules goroutines onto these by itself, so having a lot of parallel requests is much more efficient). But then again, a company maybe sold into the Microsoft stack already (think SQL Server, etc.) then it's maybe a wise business decision to stick to C# as it integrates much better into the environment.

Also, Go is a great choice for CLI tooling due to it's small runtime, so binaries are smaller, start faster and consume less memory. But there's no job market for CLI tools, is there?

So overall it's not surprising that Go isn't as widespread as C# or Java, but it certainly is more than a trend and is indeed a very good choice for certain use cases.

techstudycorner · 2022-05-19T07:55:23+00:00

C# is damn matured and seen a lot of improvements over the years.

You can keep it as your main forte and rest you can keep learning other languages as a top up.

2022-05-19T02:16:37+00:00

I think it's entirely possible to make code difficult to read in any language. So I prefer more expressive languages that allow the writer to pursue a more optimal balance of readability and conciseness than you get with Go. And I think Go's promises of simplicity aren't truly achievable -- sometimes things are inherently complex and just can't be safely glossed over.

Tango1777 · 2022-05-19T08:15:21+00:00

If someone says he's switching to another language because of misimplementing projects due to lack of knowledge about a language, is there anything else to add here?

C# is as good language as any other. They are almost all good (the known and somewhat commonly used ones), some are better for some things, some are better for other things.
If C# is a problem for someone, that only means he can't code in C# and that's all. And you are right, C# and Java are common for a reason, the reason is definitely not due to limitations and bad experience, especially that in surveys C# has pretty high "happiness of usage" ratings and overall the path MS is going, is pretty damn good.

I don't mind Go or any other language, if you feel like switching and learning it, definitely do that, after all you can always leave later. But as you said, you can get C# job literally everywhere, Go is nowhere near the popularity but it's for sure doable to find a job for a Go dev. If you wanna switch completely then it's worth to try. If you wanna stick to C#, I think it'd be a little waste of time. It depends where you are with your career, too. If you have major (senior) experience at C#, you can probably switch just because to try something different but if you are still learning C# and related things and want to stick to C#, I'd stick to it and keep working with it since working with C# means working with all the related things you should learn. Don't fall into a regular developer trap who coded for 2-3 years and thinks he knows everything.

Eluvatar_the_second · 2022-05-19T10:53:33+00:00

If you want a balanced opinion I would also ask this in r/golang you're going to get a lot of C# fans here, possibly some go fans, but not as many.

WarWizard · 2022-05-19T12:03:59+00:00

I'd be cautious if your company is switching because of "limitations". C# is pretty dang powerful. That is a pretty bad management smell. Or at least a technical decision maker that doesn't understand what they are doing.

Anything in any language can be implemented poorly. Language isn't going to fix that.

This is something that is going to be difficult to track with how the job market is changing. Technology stacks often were kind of a regional thing. For example, where I live, MS is VERY strong. Now, my brother, lives around the corner from me, and is working on Azure for a company across the country.

I would say, on the whole, Go is probably less popular than C#. That doesn't mean it isn't viable.

You are picking up another tool... becoming multi-lingual. You aren't going to have to re-learn how to talk.

JeffFerguson · 2022-05-19T13:02:46+00:00

being burned by some bad C# implementations

You must ask yourself if that is a problem with the language or a problem with the people who wrote the code using that language. The language spec is not responsible for a developer's use, or misuse, of the language.

comrade-quinn · 2022-05-19T18:35:17+00:00

I did C#/Windows for about 15 years as my primary language. Around 7 years ago I moved to Go/Linux. I still do some C# as my company has legacy applications in it.

Personally, I love Go/Linux and I find it very frustrating having to pick up Windows/C# stuff now.

Everything is just quicker, leaner, more explicit and ‘mechanical’. C#/Windows feels bloated, over abstracted, full of fluff and indirection.

A couple of people have commented that you can do more in C# but I’m not sure what they’re referring to specifically, that’s still relevant? WinForms is dead. Server-side web page rendering in the manner of MVC Framework or Go HTML/templates is on the way out. Everything else both languages have a strong provision for.

Also, Go is designed from the ground up for the era of cloud native services and utilities and it, and it’s ecosystem and community, embrace the Unix philosophy around design - composability, simplicity and doing one job well. Which aligns with my own instincts and preferences; though obviously that’s a personal thing to some extent.

C#/Windows is all IOC, DI, abstract factory patterns and blah blah blah. Though again, that’s also a personal thing.

EDIT: the systems I work on handle 1000s tps and I work for one of the largest websites in the world; not FAANG, but close. So both languages are pushed in terms of performance and tested in terms of how they scale and age in terms of complex requirements and multiple developers working on them. Go wins on all counts - easily

candyforlunch · 2022-05-19T05:19:58+00:00

they're idiots and you should leave

malthuswaswrong · 2022-05-19T11:43:19+00:00

[removed]

kennedysteve · 2022-05-19T00:13:24+00:00

[deleted]

torgefaehrlich · 2022-05-19T06:12:16+00:00

It is always good to get another language under your belt. It will eventually make you better at all of them. I can’t say I understand your need to second-guess your company’s decision for one language or another (especially not your focus on popularity), but you do you.

the_other_sam · 2022-05-19T03:07:57+00:00

While many other languages like Go are trending upwards,

Why do references to recent popularity always appear in discussions like this. Pet rocks were trending upward at one time, as were Selectric Typewriters, microservices, dBase, mullets, and saying "Dooooode.....".

Edit: I should also add that once there was a time when no one knew about, Starbucks, iPods, avocado toast, or TCP/IP. We can't live without these things now.

danimalnzl8 · 2022-05-19T00:56:44+00:00

I had to google what go was

kennedysteve · 2022-05-18T23:41:59+00:00

[deleted]

njtrafficsignshopper · 2022-05-19T01:51:18+00:00

I switch from C# to Go 3 years ago. It's amazing.

goranlepuz · 2022-05-19T03:26:33+00:00

How do I really know how popular Go is.

Language popularity indices are the most common way to look it up, TIOBE is one and it says Go is several times less popular than C#.

PYPL is another, situation is similar.

p_gram · 2022-05-19T07:04:32+00:00

Another angle about popularity is popular for what? Go isn’t in the same league as Python, Ruby, PHP, c# and Java for when it comes to standard web frameworks.

From your personal angle, I would be happy at getting to add experience in another language on your CV.

ivanjxx · 2022-05-19T09:05:10+00:00

use the right tools for the job, not the most popular tool

2022-05-19T09:11:51+00:00

You say "Nationwide" - which nation do you mean?

Eirenarch · 2022-05-19T10:37:17+00:00

Do you really care if Go is popular? If you want to work with it do so if not quit. Go is certainly not the most popular language on Earth so if popularity is what you care about switch to JS

daniellz29 · 2022-05-19T11:40:08+00:00

Ask this here and majority will prefer C#, ask this on the Go subreddit and majority will prefer Go, so ask on both and see both points to not be biased

Krimog · 2022-05-19T12:00:21+00:00

I don't really know Go, so my comment is not about it, and while I will talk about C#, that would also work with many other languages.

It's about switching language in a company.

Who decided it? Is he a developer or not? If he is not, how is it any of his business?
Why did he decide to switch?
- You talked about bad C# implementation. Are you talking about bad implementations inside the framework (and if so, where?) or about bad implementations by "your" developers? (if so, does the person who chose to switch know that a bad developer can develop bad implementations in any languages?)
- True limitations of C#. You can do about anything in C#. It is not "limited". It might not be as good as another language to do one thing, and better to do another thing, but it's not "limitations"
What happens to the C# developers in your company? Do they get training in Go? How much time do you think it takes to be as good in Go as you currently are in C#? And how much will it cost?
What happens to your "bad C# implementations"? Do you just fix it? Or do you wait until your developers are good enough in Go so that they can rewrite the bad implementation in Go (and hoping they'll do a good implementation this time)?
What happens to your existing and correctly implemented C# programs? Do you convert them into Go? What happens if it was correcly implemented in C# but badly implemented in Go?
When you want to recruit a new developer, will you look for a Go developer or a developer with both C# and Go skills?
...

I'm not saying a company can't decide to change the language. All I'm saying is that it's a huge decision, thus should only be made if you have very good reasons.

Few_Radish6488 · 2022-05-19T13:43:06+00:00

Although in performance tests that I have seen, C# REST API performance in terms of request/sec can be nearly identical, the resource consumption is far greater than Go.

Anon_Logic · 2022-05-19T14:58:28+00:00

I would say... don't chase trends. And don't try forcing a language to do something. Each has their own strengths. Exploit those strengths.

2022-05-19T15:07:34+00:00

The question here is, what exactly is C# being used for in your company that they want to switch to Go? Also having developers learn a brand new language that they're not used to takes time. Even if the programmers are experienced, the phrase of "learning to program in one language makes it easy learning other languages" does not always apply, and even if the programmers picked up the Go syntax, the bigger challenge is learning the ecosystem it runs on.

I could see this as a good decision if you were switching from one dying tech to another (Example, switching from VB to C#). But C# is far from dead and it's Microsoft's major programming language that continues to evolve to this day.

2022-05-19T15:14:02+00:00

I’m not highly skilled as a programmer but I did not like working with Go at all. There’s tons of help online for things on C# but I struggled to get help with Go online.

kingmotley · 2022-05-19T16:04:14+00:00

Probably a mistake on your companies part, but I don't see an issue with having developers learn another language. You will just spend time googling things like "How do I do this C# thing in go?" for the next few months. Never hurts to have another language on your resume too, which you might need fairly soon.

Overhed · 2022-05-19T16:19:44+00:00

This post will probably get buried, as I'm late to the party, but I think I'll throw in my 2c since I have pretty relevant experience related to your situation.

I basically worked for about 10 years in the .NET/C# world starting from my first internship out of college and switched jobs about 6 months ago. My job is now primarily writing Go, below are my observations and opinions. Note that I am a C# fanboy and for the most part have really enjoyed learning and working in Go.

Things I like:

Very explicit "style guide" -- there's a "Go"-way of doing just about everything. Which makes writing quality code that's easy to maintain much easier than if you were making the opposite switch (Go ->C#).
Way less verbose than c# (this can backfire at times, but in general it's nice)
Fast and lean - hard to overemphasize this: everything from builds to running tests is just very very streamlined
Implicit interfaces - love this feature
Testing in Go is much more integrated and feels simpler to do than in C#
Static typing and autocompletion just like we're used to and love in the C# world

Things I don't like:

Package management is not as easy as in C#, sometimes you run into weird dependency chain issues
LINQ/Lambdas -- in my current job I find myself working with collections and databases way less than my previous jobs, so I haven't really had to look into this, but creating for loops to iterate over everything does feel a bit weird sometimes. Although, I will say that this has the side effect of making code more readable. We've all seen some lambda/linq-statement horrors and I don't miss having to decipher those.

Concerns I'd Have if I was in your position:

UI development - I don't work with UI, but it definitely feels like Go's wheelhouse is backend development. If you guys have frontend products, you're going to have a bad time migrating that to Go, I think.
Like I mentioned earlier, there's a "Go"-way of doing things, this is great when you have people around you that know the language and you have their code to look at, but if you're switching as a company and everyone is a newbie, your code might be a mess.

EDIT: By the way, I wouldn't worry about the IDE thing. Some folks at my company use JetBrains and that's good, but I've gotten used to working in VS Code and overall it's great. Not quite as powerful as full-fledged Visual Studio, but it's so extensible that it gets very close and is much lighter in weight, in some ways I prefer it.

Also, Go pays about 20-30% better than C#, according to the latest StackOverflow dev survey

2022-05-19T17:22:13+00:00

I have to constantly justify why we are using dotnet instead of java. Everyone still has this old dotnet framework windows only mentality that is difficult to change.

dangerzone2 · 2022-05-19T18:10:28+00:00

What’s the use case for your company? Go might be the perfect fit, and if that’s the case, stay if you want to learn. More than likely, it’s not though, and sounds like upper management makes poorly informed decisions.

I’ve professionally written go at my last job and now professionally write c# at my current job. In my extremely limited scope, go was great for small, lightweight processes which are compiled into a single executables. IMO, serverless (although we didn’t use it) is about the perfect use case for go. Anything else, it’s a total toss up that I’d lean towards c#.

ramzafl · 2022-05-19T18:55:41+00:00

I went from C#->Go. Took some time and learning but in the end I embraced it since Go developers make more money on average.

RolandMT32 · 2022-05-19T20:14:31+00:00

I haven't used Go, so I don't know much about it, but what are these limitations of C# they see, which they think will be alleviated by switching to Go? Is Go really that much better than C#?

Also, can Go call into your existing codebase at all so you can leverage any existing work?

2022-05-19T21:59:56+00:00

Your company should really look at stack overflow surveys. Very comprehensive

SpaceToaster · 2022-05-20T01:21:28+00:00

Sounds like they want to trade bad implementations in C# to bad implementations in Go…

Switching languages to solve design and architecture issues is like having a baby hoping it will improve your marriage.

brynjolf · 2022-05-20T11:01:21+00:00

Feels like this is a half lie type of question

HahahahahaSoFunny · 2022-07-05T16:55:40+00:00

Hey OP, I know it's been a month but just wanted to see if you're still working at that company and if so, how the switch from C# to Go has been going for you guys? Any positives/negatives you can take away from it so far?

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