> *Go and Python are also pretty related for command line apps too. You could to...

nickjj · on July 2, 2019

Yeah totally, for using CLI tools I much prefer using a Go binary too because it doesn't involve installing anything.

But in practice as a web developer who occasionally writes CLI scripts, I personally didn't think it was worth going all-in with Go for that.

Especially not when for smaller scripts you can have a Python or Bash script in 1 file[0] and it will run on all major platforms without installing 3rd party libraries too. Most major distros of Linux, MacOS and WSL on Windows have both Python and Bash available. For my use cases that's good enough.

[0]: For example just the other day I released a ~200 line self contained Python script to solve a problem I had which was figuring out what changed between 2 web framework versions: https://github.com/nickjj/verdiff

falcolas · on July 2, 2019

Given the broad capabilities of the Python first party libraries, you can do a lot of work without 3rd party libraries. It’s not in as much fashion as it was 10+ years ago, but it’s still quite doable.

yellowapple · on July 2, 2019

This is true for Python, too, albeit quite a bit harder due to the relative lack of first-party tooling for generating standalone executables.

cutler · on July 2, 2019

As far as I'm aware Go doesn't return the exit status of a process the way Ruby and Python do. Surely this is a big disadvantage for CLI scripts?

malvosenior · on July 2, 2019

Sure it does: https://gobyexample.com/exit

If you mean Go can't read the exit status of a command it runs, that's incorrect as well: https://golang.org/pkg/os/exec/#pkg-overview