Re: [dev] Suckless remote shell?

From: Bobby Powers <bobbypowers_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2013 13:10:56 -0500

2013/11/4 Szabolcs Nagy <nsz_AT_port70.net>:
> the state-of-the-artedness is not a virtue of a programming language

Agreed. At the same time, I don't think 'it is not C' should be an
automatic point against a language. C is excellent and quite useful,
however Go's language is wonderfully simple and makes expressing
certain things quite clear an succinct.

> the main problem with go is that (like java and many other high level
> languages) it tries to ignore unix legacy while building on it

It was written by the people behind plan 9. It is somewhat of an
appeal to authority, but I tend to give the Go authors the benefit of
the doubt when it comes to the unix legacy.

> go is special in that it builds on the binary syscall layer instead of
> the somewhat portable c api (the syscall layer is not even expected to
> be stable on every unix, openbsd just broke it to have 64bit time_t
> on 32bit systems, so go releases and existing go binaries are broken
> on the latest 32bit openbsd)

As are all statically linked C binaries, Go isn't special here.
OpenBSD broke their ABI.

> so the go ssh package is not useful for programs written in c (they can
> only use it through some ipc mechanism, not in the same process)

True, I did not mean to imply it should be used from C, just that it
is the only sane SSH implementation I've personally looked at.

> go cannot completely replace the c ecosystem in the unix userspace
> because of its runtime (gc etc) so we are left with yet another set
> of reimplementation of the world, a separate platform to maintain
> for eternity

Why does the go runtime & GC mean that it cannot replace the C unix
userspace? Or are you saying that you see the runtime as
overcomplicated, so you do not wish unix userspace to be replaced with
a unix userspace written in Go?

yours,
Bobby
Received on Mon Nov 04 2013 - 19:10:56 CET