A case for Go as the best language for AI agents

evanjrowley

Go has govulncheck[0] for static analysis of vulnerabilities in both code and binaries. The govulncheck tool has first-class support in the Go ecosystem. No other language has this level of integration with a static analyzer and at best will only analyze for known vulnerable modules (PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG). [0] https://go.dev/doc/tutorial/govulncheck

arrow7000

> I have worked with PHP, Go, JavaScript, and Python in a professional capacity for over 10 years now. Well if it's a choice between these 4, then sure. Not sure that really suffices to qualify Go as "the" best language for agents

0x3f

I think the more you can shift to compile time the better when it comes to agents. Go is therefore 'ok', but the type system isn't as useful as other options. I would say Rust is quite good for just letting something churn through compiler errors until it works, and then you're unlikely to get runtime errors. I haven't tried Haskell, but I assume that's even better.

synergy20

i have not used go for a while until claude code 4.5+, and yes it's the best language for AI coders.

abhimanyurawat

you had me at Compile time bugs, strong typing, and static typing. With Go it will increasingly become that one has to write the design doc carefully with constraints, for semi tech/coder folks it does make a lot of sense. With Python, making believe is easy(seen it multiple times myself), but do you think that coding agent/LLM has to be quite malicious to put make believe logic in compile time lang compared with interpreted languages?

esafak

Go's fast compile times (feedback) are good for dumb models. Smarter ones are more likely to get it right and can therefore use languages with richer type systems.

stackghost

I independently came to this conclusion myself a few months ago. I don't particularly enjoy working with Go. I find it to be cumbersome and tedious to write by hand. I find the syntax to be just different enough from C++ or C# to be irritating. Don't get me started on the package versioning system. But it does have the benefit of having a very strong "blessed way of doing things", so agents go off the rails less, and if claude is writing the code and endless "if err != nil" then the syntax bothers me less.

patrickthebold

I happen to just stumble across this article https://felixbarbalet.com/simple-made-inevitable-the-economi... extolling the virtues of Clojure. It specifically calls out Go for not being simple in the ways that matter for LLMs. I've no idea myself, I just thought it was interesting for comparison.

radium3d

Agents are language agnostic actually, I think "best" this "best" that is a little overboard.

poidos

Doesn't the high quantity of boilerplate pollute the context, thereby making agents less useful over time? i.e. go is not "token efficient"

gmueckl

I had a lot of success when having agents write D code. The results for me have been better than with C# or C++. I hadn't considered Go. Does anybody have some experience about how D fares vs. Go?

pjcurran

I happen to just stumble across this article https://felixbarbalet.com/simple-made-inevitable-the-economi... extolling the virtues of Clojure. It specifically calls out Go for not being simple in the ways that matter for LLMs. I've no idea myself, I just thought it was interesting for comparison.

justinhj

Intuitively I expect this. Go is a language designed by Rob Pike to keep legions of high IQ Google engineers constrained down a simple path. There's generally one way to do it in Go. As a human programmer with creative and aesthetic urges as well as being lazy and having an ego, I love expressive languages that let me describe what I want in a parsimonious fashion. ie As few lines of code as possible and no boilerplate. With the advances in agent coding none of these concerns matter any more. What matters most is can easily look at the code and understand the intent clearly. That the agent doesn't get distracted by formatting. That the code is relatively memory safe, type safe and avoids null issues and cannot ignore errors. I dislike Go but I am a lot more likely to use it in this new world.

moritz

C.f., from 25d ago: “Why Elixir is the best language for AI” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46900241 - for comparison of the arguments made - features a bit more actual data than “intuitions” compared to OP - interesting to think about in an agent context specifically is runtime introspection afforded by the BEAM (which, out of how it developed, has always been very important in that world) - the blog post has a few notes on that as well

mccolin

> Joy and energy is one of the rarest resources a small team can have when building large projects I really love this point-out. Not always an easy sell upstream, but a big factor in happy + productive teams.

afry1

If code is now free, why does the language matter at all?

storus

As long as python runs all the models, the best language for agents is likely Python as it allows e.g. auto-fine-tuning of (local) LLMs for self-improving agents without the need to change the programming language. Use Pydantic if you care about type/runtime errors.

philipp-gayret

I've read these arguments and they make perfect sense; but having tried different projects rewritten in Go vs Python (with Claude & Cursor); Python was just significantly faster, smaller, and easier to understand for Claude. It was done faster, and made less mistakes. I don't mean faster as execution time, but the code for its Python projects was almost a magnitude smaller. So it was done by the time its Go counterpart was halfway. Maybe it's gotten better, or I need some kind of "how to Go" skill for Claude... But just didn't work out of the box _for me_ as well as Python did. I tried a couple projects rewritten in different languages; Go, Kotlin, Python, Javascript. I settled with Python. (My own background is in Kotlin, Java and C++.)

NitpickLawyer

For the go vs rust points in the article: - I agree that go's syntax and concepts are simpler (esp when you write libraries, some rust code can get gnarly and take a lot of brain cycles to parse everything) - > idiomatic way of writing code and simpler to understand for humans - eh, to some extent. I personally hate go's boilerplate of "if err != nil" but that's mainly my problem. - compiles faster, no question about it - more go code out there allowing models to generate better code in Go than Rust - eh, here I somewhat disagree. The quality of the code matters as well. That's why a lot of early python code was so bad. There just is so much bad python out there. I would say that code quality and correctness matters as well, and I'd bet there's more "production ready" (heh) rust code out there than go code. - (go) it is an opinionated language - so is rust, in a lot of ways. There are a lot of things that make writing really bad rust code pretty hard. And you get lots of protections for foot meets gun type of situations. AFAIK in go you can still write locking code using channels. I don't think you can do that in rust. - something I didn't see mentioned is error messages. I think rust errors are some of the best in the industry, and they are sooo useful to LLMs (I've noticed this ever since coding with gpt4 era models!) I guess we'll have to wait and see. There will be a lot of code written by agents going forward, we'll be spoiled for choice.