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I don't have any particular affinity for Google, but they're still a business and they're already developing the Go language (and relevant infrastructure) at th

I don't have any particular affinity for Google, but they're still a business and they're already developing the Go language (and relevant infrastructure) at their own expense. It's not like the Go team at Google has access to the entire Alphabet war chest like your "biggest, richest, well-staffed companies on the planet" suggests.

nouveaux 4y ago
Go since inception has always been well funded. It is authored by some of the biggest names in programming and they are on staff at Google. This is not a side hobby. Not sure why you're suggesting that Go is lacking in resources.
- geodel 4y ago
  No. It is much smaller team as far as resources go. Compared to Swift for Apple or Java for Oracle, Go is not strategic bet for Google. There is absolutely no dependency on Go to develop services for Google platform in it. Hell, large number of Google employees spend time on disparaging Go. It does not happen for other company sponsored languages.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Someone in the Go team (rsc, IIRC) commented on how a Google executive came to him in the cafeteria to congratulate him on the launch. It turns out the executive confused him with someone on the Dart or Flutter teams.
    - geodel 4y ago
      Thanks for this anecdote! This is hilarious but seems very true to me.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
      I just hope it wasn't Rob Pike.
      - fmajid 4y ago
        Found it: Ian Lance Taylor: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzcym2FBAAJ https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzc... Now a bit of personal history. The Go project was started, by Rob, Robert, and Ken, as a bottom-up project. I joined the project some 9 months later, on my own initiative, against my manager's preference. There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go (I recall a time when Google's SVP of Engineering saw some of us in the cafeteria and congratulated us on a release; this was surprising since we hadn't released anything recently, and it soon came up that he thought we were working on the Dart language, not the Go language.)
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  Yes, Google staffs its Go team, but the original comment invokes Google's vast wealth as though its entire market cap is available for the development of Go, which is of course absurd. Google probably spends single-digit millions of dollars on Go annually, and it seems they've determined that supporting Drew's use case would require a nontrivial share of that budget which they feel could be spent to greater effect elsewhere. Go is not only a "side project" at Google, but one of its most trivial side projects.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Knowing that "we only have a few million in funding per year" was a valid excuse for generating abusive traffic and refusing to do anything about it, would definitely have changed a few conversations I've had working at startups. Interesting.
    - throwaway894345 4y ago
      Of course, Google doesn't materially benefit from optimizing the module proxy for Drew's use case, and I doubt your startups would have made traffic optimization its top priority either under similar circumstances (which is to say "no ROI from traffic optimization").
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Drew's use case?!
        throwaway894345 4y ago
        "scenario"? Pick your synonym.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    They wouldn't write significant parts of their backend in a side project.
treis 4y ago
But this isn't one of those "we developed fast and did dumb stuff". They put significant effort into doing something dumb.
Analemma_ 4y ago
Surely Google of all places has the most tested, battle-hardened robots.txt library in existence, and they have a company-wide public monorepo to boot. There's no excuse for this.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure parsing robots.txt isn't the challenge. The Go team asserts that there are technical difficulties to this traffic optimization, and I don't have any reason to disbelieve them (they're clearly not dumb people, and I certainly trust them more than Internet randoms when it comes to maintaining the Go module proxy). It's a bummer for Drew, but he isn't Google's top priority right now (it seems wild to me that you think there is "no excuse" for Google not to prioritize niche use cases like Drew's--how do you imagine large organizations choose what to work on?).
Dylan16807 4y ago
It seems like they're getting tons of bandwidth paid by the war chest if they don't care about this waste at all.
wmf 4y ago
This problem isn't really specific to Google. If some hobby project was DoSing sites it would get banned. "We don't have the resources to not DoS" is not a valid excuse. The Go team needs to scope their ambitions properly; if they can't make their proxy work safely they should not have bothered to develop it.

nouveaux 4y ago

Go since inception has always been well funded. It is authored by some of the biggest names in programming and they are on staff at Google. This is not a side hobby. Not sure why you're suggesting that Go is lacking in resources.

geodel 4y ago
No. It is much smaller team as far as resources go. Compared to Swift for Apple or Java for Oracle, Go is not strategic bet for Google. There is absolutely no dependency on Go to develop services for Google platform in it. Hell, large number of Google employees spend time on disparaging Go. It does not happen for other company sponsored languages.
- fmajid 4y ago
  Someone in the Go team (rsc, IIRC) commented on how a Google executive came to him in the cafeteria to congratulate him on the launch. It turns out the executive confused him with someone on the Dart or Flutter teams.
  - geodel 4y ago
    Thanks for this anecdote! This is hilarious but seems very true to me.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    I just hope it wasn't Rob Pike.
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Found it: Ian Lance Taylor: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzcym2FBAAJ https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzc... Now a bit of personal history. The Go project was started, by Rob, Robert, and Ken, as a bottom-up project. I joined the project some 9 months later, on my own initiative, against my manager's preference. There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go (I recall a time when Google's SVP of Engineering saw some of us in the cafeteria and congratulated us on a release; this was surprising since we hadn't released anything recently, and it soon came up that he thought we were working on the Dart language, not the Go language.)
throwaway894345 4y ago
Yes, Google staffs its Go team, but the original comment invokes Google's vast wealth as though its entire market cap is available for the development of Go, which is of course absurd. Google probably spends single-digit millions of dollars on Go annually, and it seems they've determined that supporting Drew's use case would require a nontrivial share of that budget which they feel could be spent to greater effect elsewhere. Go is not only a "side project" at Google, but one of its most trivial side projects.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Knowing that "we only have a few million in funding per year" was a valid excuse for generating abusive traffic and refusing to do anything about it, would definitely have changed a few conversations I've had working at startups. Interesting.
  - throwaway894345 4y ago
    Of course, Google doesn't materially benefit from optimizing the module proxy for Drew's use case, and I doubt your startups would have made traffic optimization its top priority either under similar circumstances (which is to say "no ROI from traffic optimization").
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Drew's use case?!
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        "scenario"? Pick your synonym.
- monocasa 4y ago
  They wouldn't write significant parts of their backend in a side project.

treis 4y ago

But this isn't one of those "we developed fast and did dumb stuff". They put significant effort into doing something dumb.

Analemma_ 4y ago

Surely Google of all places has the most tested, battle-hardened robots.txt library in existence, and they have a company-wide public monorepo to boot. There's no excuse for this.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I'm pretty sure parsing robots.txt isn't the challenge. The Go team asserts that there are technical difficulties to this traffic optimization, and I don't have any reason to disbelieve them (they're clearly not dumb people, and I certainly trust them more than Internet randoms when it comes to maintaining the Go module proxy). It's a bummer for Drew, but he isn't Google's top priority right now (it seems wild to me that you think there is "no excuse" for Google not to prioritize niche use cases like Drew's--how do you imagine large organizations choose what to work on?).

Dylan16807 4y ago

It seems like they're getting tons of bandwidth paid by the war chest if they don't care about this waste at all.

wmf 4y ago

This problem isn't really specific to Google. If some hobby project was DoSing sites it would get banned. "We don't have the resources to not DoS" is not a valid excuse. The Go team needs to scope their ambitions properly; if they can't make their proxy work safely they should not have bothered to develop it.