Re: [libvirt] Redesigning Libvirt: Adopting use of a safe language

On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 17:27:01 +0000, Daniel Berrange wrote: Note at first: This is a personal opinion. I'm not discrediting any advantages a different language might have in technical sense. I'm against this. Go is a utterly ugly language. It looks as the authors wanted to be so hip so that they had to do a lot of stuff backwards. Literally. Just look at variable declaration. While some concepts might be cool, the rest of the stuff makes my eyes bleed. I hate it. Seriously who on earth thought that the network socket connection API should be called 'dial'. Any language allows for people to do mistakes. You can eliminate the very common mistakes, but they are comparatively easy to spot and fix. You can't eliminate the very subtle logic problems, which usually linger a long time in libvirt. While the language itself may get rid of one layer of compatibility functions/libraries like gnulib, most of our uses are hidden in utility functions. Getting rid of it will remove some stuff but we will end up with a different pile of utility code in a different language. It may be simpler in the end but it will be there and will be used similarly as we use the current utility code. There's no clear win in my opinion here. Then there's the rewrite. While the language may allow calling of C code and being called from C code we will need to draw a line somewhere. Adding new Go code into existing C code will be ugly. Rejecting someones contribution because it's in C is wrong. Also just spending time writing the same stuff in a supposedly cooler language feels wrong to me. I can see the value in adding new stuff, but it's a waste to rewrite existing stuff. Then there's debugging. Official docs hint to use GDB but in the same paragraph note that GDB does not work entirely well with Go programs. [1] There might be other tools like Delve [2] which are still under heavy development. I'm not entirely persuaded in this area. I don't like this. Don't expect me to write any Go code. Peter [1] https://golang.org/doc/gdb [2] https://github.com/derekparker/delve