Why Go Is A Minimalist Language • The Applied Go Weekly Newsletter 2025-09-07
Your weekly source of Go news, tips, and projects
Why Go Is A Minimalist Language
Hi ,
The world isn't simple. Every day, we have to deal with all sorts of complexity around us. Nothing wrong with that: Life is all about solving problems. (Or, to cite Zach Weinersmith, "Really, you should just think of every moment of your life as a series of escape rooms. It's healthy.") But precisely for that reason, we shouldn't willingly add useless complexity to our lives.
Let me find a good example for that... uh, yes: software engineering. Faced with building an app, software engineers are tempted to throw ready-made building blocks at the problem: a distributed cloud database here, a software orchestration platform there, a fleet of microservices on top, and then tons of tools to keep control over the resulting Rube Goldberg machine.
Bloated software can also result from software architecture understood wrong. When functionality gets abstracted away so much that it's barely recognizable anymore and you would have to wade through layers of architectural code to uncover the few lines that actually do the work, then it becomes much harder, instead of easier (which is what the abstractions were originally aimed at), to maintain, improve, and extend this code.
When building software, we should zoom out from time to time and see if we're still writing meaningful code or already floating in the sixth meta-dimension we built around the original problem space. Or better, start minimal and stay minimal. And what's better for a minimalist approach to software construction than a language that was created on minimalistic concepts?
Like the one covered in the Spotlight section...
Featured articles
Go Channels: A Runtime Internals Deep Dive - DEV Community
Go channel mechanics decomposed. Channels are nothing but... structs, mutexes, functions, and a dose of snuggling with the scheduler.
How Go Schedules Millions of Goroutines: A Deep Dive into GMP | by
A great next read after the article about channels: Go scheduler internals.
Lifecycle management in Go tests | Redowan's Reflections
Go is a test-happy language, with testing built right into the toolchain. But how do you manage the lifecycle of tests (that is, setup—testing—teardown)? Here is the ultimate test lifecycle primer.
Podcast corner
Fallthrough | What It Takes To Be A Content Creator
A somewhat unusual Fallthrough episode, as it deals neither with Go nor with any dev stuff around Go. Still, if you're a solo developer trying to market your project, knowing how to create good content can make a difference.
Spotlight: Why Go Is A Minimalist Language
Recently, I wondered: What would be a good language for minimalists? A language that achieves more with less? A language that focuses on problem solving by hiding all those low-level tasks that some tool could do better?
Make no mistake: minimalism in programming languages isn't about the simplest language mechanics possible. A plain Turing machine is perhaps as simple as a language can get; yet, you won't get far if you set forth to implement anything meaningful by hand in "Turing machine language".
It's also not just about language syntax and semantics. Minimalistic software development aims at achieving maximum results with minimal resource use. For instance, tasked with architecting an API service with a database and a caching layer, a developer might choose PostgreSQL and Redis—two typical choices, right? And following the old (and outdated) saying that "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" (when IBM was the go-to seller of PCs and office machinery), developers are quick to think, "nothing's wrong with choosing PostgreSQL and Redis."
However, had they analyzed the problem a bit closer, they might have discovered that the service requires no database server and only a fraction of Redis' capabilities. They might then decide to use SQLite and a native Go caching package (or maybe even just in-memory SQLite), and—poof!—the need for setting up and maintaining two additional servers evaporates.
Or think of the developer who uses Kubernetes for building any software stack, even when a simple systemd solution would be more than enough.
This is the kind of minimalistic software development I'm talking about. And minimalism also means to be able to focus your energy on the problem rather than language peculiarities or automatable tasks like memory management. A language for software minimalists doesn't stand in the developer's way.
So let me come to the point: I think Go checks quite a few boxes in this discipline.
As a language for minimalists, –
- Go apps require no pre-installed runtime, no virtual machine, even no system libraries to run
- Go has a small core language with a simple (but not simplistic) syntax, fostering fast learning and easy reading of code, especially others' code (because you read code much more often that you write it)
- Go has a very efficient garbage collector that moves the tedious work of managing memory allocations and deallocations off your shoulders—the last thing you'd want to create and maintain is a codebase that continually concerns itself with memory management
- Go comes with a rich standard library that reduces the need for third-party libraries—fewer dependencies mean fewer places outside your control
- Go has a feature-rich toolchain that covers all development tasks from compiling and building to testing and dependency management
- Likewise, turning source code into a binary requires
- Go said "thanks but no thanks" to inheritance at a time virtually everyone (except the FP folks) considered OOP the peak of programming language evloution; now it has proven for years that inheritance (with all of its complications) simply isn't required to build great software
- Go intentionally forgoes method overloading and operator overloading, to greatly reduce the magic of source code
- Go has no macros and no metaprogramming (boy, I once had the "honor" to look at some heavily obfuscated C code that was half C and half macros. Instantly, I knew that the programmer who created this had drastically reduced the chances of getting fired, because who else would understand such code in their sane mind?)
- Go ends the source code formatting war with
gofmtand the formatting rules that come with it. As a Go proverb says, "Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite."
Some of these aspects may seem minor, but summed up, they make Go an ideal language for minimalist software development.
Quote of the Week: 99%
Every time someone writes the word ‘discussed’ I always assume they’re talking about the disc throwing sport.
That’s wrong a good 99% of the time.
More articles, videos, talks
GitHub - go-monk/from-bash-to-go-part-i: Go for Bash Programmers - Part I: The Language
I've seen Pythonistas and Java devs turn to Go... but "from Bash to Go" is quite a new path to me.
A Synthetic Stock Price Generator in GoLang: Part 1 · Coding Hedgehog
Brownian motion is how molecules move at temperatures above 0 Kelvin. The algorithm that simulates Brownian motion can also generate realistic-looking stock prices.
Avoiding Common sync.WaitGroup Mistakes in Go - Calhoun.io
How Go 1.25 simplifies WaitGroups.
GitHub - rsc/gophershirt: Gopher Hawaiian Shirts
This is not, repeat: NOT, a new software design pattern. Sorry, Gang Of Four!
Projects
Libraries
GitHub - DeluxeOwl/chronicle: Idiomatic, type safe event sourcing framework for Go.
"Event Sourcing is an architectural pattern where you store all changes to application state as a sequence of immutable events, allowing you to reconstruct any past state by replaying events and providing a complete audit trail of what happened in your system." (Thank you, Claude.)
GitHub - enetx/surf: SURF - Advanced Go HTTP client with Chrome/Firefox browser impersonation, HTTP/3 with QUIC fingerprinting, JA3/JA4 TLS emulation, and anti-bot bypass for web automation and scraping.
While I generally dislike (and discourage) techniques for evading bot detection, there are a few legitimate use cases; so use this package if you want, but use it ethically. There are enough selfish bots around already, eating bandwidth and server CPU time for nothing.
GitHub - o0olele/octree-go: octree and pathfinding in golang
Let your NPCs find their paths through 3D mazes.
A lightweight, zero-dependency, and idiomatic job scheduler for Go.
"Bro, I even learnt a lot by looking to your code - especially schedule - I consider to contribute it." – /u/elmasalpemre
GitHub - pedrohavay/followthemoney: A Go port of FollowTheMoney (FtM) — a pragmatic data model for people, companies, assets, relationships and documents used in investigative work and financial crime analysis.
Go for open source investigations (OSINT): FollowTheMoney is a data model for financial crime investigations and data forensics with a formidable range of real-life use cases.
Tools and applications
GitHub - thetnaingtn/kirin: Scaffold a Full-stack Go gRPC Application With End-to-end Type Safety.
Like connectRPC but focusing on enabling full-stack applications with a single executable for easier deployment.
Gra: simple strategy game
A round-based strategy game built with Ebitengine. Play against friends or AI bots.
GitHub - a-le/db-portal: SQL editor, ETL. Cross-platform. Runs as a Go HTTP server with a browser-based interface. Supports solo and multi-user modes with role-based permissions. Easily copy data between databases, Excel, JSON, and CSV.
There are a few command-line tools around for accessing various data sources via SQL (thinking of octosql), but this one has a Web UI.
Completely unrelated to Go
Deploy Hugo static site to Hetzner
Not entirely unrelated to Go: Alex Pliutau uses Hugo (Go) and Caddy (Go) to run a static website on an affordable VPS.
Static Sites Enable a Good Time Travel Experience · Preslav Rachev
I never understood the point of using database-driven CMSs for blogs, TBH.
Happy coding! ʕ◔ϖ◔ʔ
Questions or feedback? Drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you.
Best from Munich, Christoph
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