Rowan Bohde

Cool Things About Go From A Haskell Perspective

Posted by Rowan Bohde

Go gets a pretty bad reputation among Haskell programmers, and it's really not fair. I've been using both of them for several years now, and am in the pretty unique position of working on a Go compiler in Haskell.

Go has a lot of really nice features and tooling that make my day to day life developing it really great. Here are a some of them:

Compile times

They are pretty fast, so much so that I'm more likely to recompile in Go than in Haskell when developing.

Static linking

I (almost) never need to worry about LD_LIBRARY_PATH (which is not a huge problem in Haskell), or operating system dependencies.

Cross compilation

I use Linux. If I need a coworker to test on their Mac, it's trivial to build and send a binary. This is made way easier by static linking, since I don't need to worry about their library setup.

gofmt

Use gofmt and your team will never have a review comment asking for formatting changes. It's fast enough to be run on save without any noticeable latency, which I cannot say for any Haskell formatters.

goimports

Go's imports are qualified by default. Because of this, you can setup goimports, and never think about your import lines again.

go test

Having a default test runner inside the compiler means adding tests is way easier in Go. Combined with the test file convention (files ending in _test.go will only be built during test), makes adding tests to a package way less friction.

As a bonus, the test framework includes a benchmark runner.

quick

The standard library comes with a small property testing framework, quick. It's not as fancy as quickcheck, but it can still catch bugs. If you want a proper property testing framework, use gopter.

Build tags

Build tags let files be conditionally compiled. This lets us avoid C preprocessor hacks.

This is how the test runner knows what files are considered to be parts of tests: the _test.go suffix signals the file should be built during test.

Package structure

All the Go files in a given directory are considered part of a package. There also is not a distinction between modules and packages, like in Haskell. Combined with build tags, this lets us avoid a lot of extra modules for test or certain build conditions. It also cleanly decouples the file size from the module size, as there's no need to make a new module if the file is getting too large.

As a result, managing namespaces is a whole lot less fussy in Go than other languages. If I want to test a single module, the test runner can do that, while only compiling the files I need.

tools

A whole lot of compiler internals are just exposed as libraries and binaries. This makes tooling like gofmt and goimports easier to write.