Java vs Go

Modern Java is a well known and massive Ecosystem in the Enterprise.

Go (2009) on the other hand is probably best known as a “Google language”, notably powering Web Apps (APIs) and DevOps (Docker) workloads.

Java compared to Go

Strengths:

• Mature JVM that effectively compiles code once warmed up (just-in-time compiler)
• Massive amount of libraries
• Many developers in the market

Weaknesses:

• Confusing licensing terms esp regarding their API
• Bloat everywhere
• Slow iterations
• Verbose
• No clear way to do one one thing e.g. maven/gradle, tomcat/undertow
• A lot of knowledge is needed for certain use cases like serverless since performance time needs to be tweaked, creating hassles for devops teams who might be a little weak on Java insider knowledge
• Requires an IDE for productivity
• Reliance on heavyweight tooling
• Some fragmentation - Scala & Kotlin might offer short term productivity gains, but long term support is unknown

Go compared to Java

Strengths:

• Simple BSD licensing
• Simple, well designed language
• Strong standard library for most needs with a growing third party package ecosystem
• Less moving parts (LOC)
• Concurrency is easier to achieve
• Backed by Google with several case studies - together with a survey claiming developer productivity boosts
• Build (no gradle!), packaging & testing is part of the distribution (no tricky choices)
• Debugger (delve), code formatter (gofmt), profiler & language server (gopls) independent of any IDE so any editor can integrate (including vim!)
• Near instant build/run times - great for serverless
• Better error capture
• Growing libraries
• https://play.golang.org/ makes it simple to share running code by URL

Weaknesses:

There is generally a higher demand for good engineers than supply in Singapore.

— Sau Sheong (@sausheong) April 7, 2021

• Scarcity hiring Go developers
• Not as mature as the Java ecosystem

Conclusion

Finding a good engineer is a problem with any programming language. Go is easy to learn and productive with “just works” developer experience, unlike Java which has many crufty corners and is quite a painful developer experience. Furthermore with the Infrastructure trend to go managed runtime with Serverless, Go is a better goto candidate to get up and running.

Whether Java or Go depends also on what you're trying to deliver. Sometimes a well-established Java library that is highly performant makes it well worth going with Java too. It's not black or white.

— Sau Sheong (@sausheong) April 7, 2021