4 ms·

If I want to understand my program and where it spends time, I use a profiler. If Go maintainers want telemetry, they should provide an optional profiler that a

by vivegi 4y ago

If I want to understand my program and where it spends time, I use a profiler. If Go maintainers want telemetry, they should provide an optional profiler that adds telemetry and whoever wants to opt in can use it after twiddling the appropriate knobs. Just claiming violation of CoC and forcing it on the entire userbase is atrocious. If I have not made my code open source, stop snooping. If you want to know how your features are used, go and analyze open source codebases. And it must be default turned off. Don't use dark patterns like default telemetry on and hoping that x% of users will forget to turn it off in a week and we will get our data. Smells bad.

bayindirh 4y ago
To be honest, I'm pretty against telemetry in Go, but it's not about the compiled code itself. They want to telemetrize the go command and compiler itself to collect data about which language features used (I assume), and how the go command is used. Again, I'm pretty against it. My red-line is opt-in telemetry, and even that's a place I don't want to arrive.
- vivegi 4y ago
  I think we are in agreement. The problem I have with the principle of forced telemetry is I have no way (or more precisely, time) to understand that their telemetry red-line stops with command line logging/analysis. So, I have to assume the worst with the toolchain. Microsoft .NET also introduced opt-out telemetry (ie., turned ON by default and you could opt-out by setting an environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1|true|yes). These are just dark patterns by big-tech and erode developer trust. Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture on "Trusting Trust" comes to mind. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Both of us are completely on the same page. Funnily, I have made the same reference to the same paper [0]. The comment has a "let's talk about how we stop there and not move forward than that" tone, because frankly, I don't think Go maintainers and Google will say "Oh, we overreached, sorry. Let's abandon it and never talk about it again". However, even discussing telemetry and being so adamant about it made me reconsider the extent I'm going to use Go in the future. [0]: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409#discussioncomment-4928702 https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409#discussioncom...

by vivegi 4y ago

bayindirh 4y ago

To be honest, I'm pretty against telemetry in Go, but it's not about the compiled code itself. They want to telemetrize the go command and compiler itself to collect data about which language features used (I assume), and how the go command is used. Again, I'm pretty against it. My red-line is opt-in telemetry, and even that's a place I don't want to arrive.

vivegi 4y ago
I think we are in agreement. The problem I have with the principle of forced telemetry is I have no way (or more precisely, time) to understand that their telemetry red-line stops with command line logging/analysis. So, I have to assume the worst with the toolchain. Microsoft .NET also introduced opt-out telemetry (ie., turned ON by default and you could opt-out by setting an environment variable DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1|true|yes). These are just dark patterns by big-tech and erode developer trust. Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture on "Trusting Trust" comes to mind. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Both of us are completely on the same page. Funnily, I have made the same reference to the same paper [0]. The comment has a "let's talk about how we stop there and not move forward than that" tone, because frankly, I don't think Go maintainers and Google will say "Oh, we overreached, sorry. Let's abandon it and never talk about it again". However, even discussing telemetry and being so adamant about it made me reconsider the extent I'm going to use Go in the future. [0]: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409#discussioncomment-4928702 https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/58409#discussioncom...