Curious to Go!

Today I started learning some fundamentals of Go. When setting up my local dev environment, I found a very peculiar anomaly in the compile time of Go programs. This was very different and I tried my best to search the WWW for a satisfying answer. I came across many discussions claiming Windows Defender as the culprit. I also tried exempting my project directory from the Windows Defender scanning, with a hope that it’ll let me run my Go programs in peace, but it didn’t ☹

Since I mostly use Git bash to write simple programs, I never felt any lags before when compling binaries of CPP. I tried again to write a simple CPP program to benchmark the build speed of Go with CPP. The results were not that good I would say!

have a look at the below screenshots,

This is CPP compile time

This is Go compile time

Notice the huge difference of 6s (approx)

Don’t know why, but I’ve heard some words about UNIX/POSIX being the first class citizen of Go development, thus the linker does it’s job well on Linux machines. I must also admit that windows completely follow a different approach with the file system which may also be the cause in slowing down the linker.

Let’s not get into the Linux/Windows debate 🤣

Will benchmark the same on a proper linux machine soon!

Until then signing off,

~/CR08