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The value it’s brought to Google has definitely not been worth the cost. It did not really replace other languages. If you join Google now as a new engineer, y

The value it’s brought to Google has definitely not been worth the cost. It did not really replace other languages. If you join Google now as a new engineer, you will likely be writing C++, Java, or maybe a web language

scythe 3y ago
A friend of mine who works for Google noted that they hardly use Go internally, and quipped, "Google invented Go to sabotage its competitors."
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  That used to be the joke about open sourcing GCL and borgmon, I guess some of which ended up in k8s. Good luck out there!
  - bananapub 3y ago
    or as actually happened, jsonnet and prometheus! I still wonder how many potential competitors the mapreduce and bigtable papers eliminated. perhaps it doesn't matter since the people that blindly adopted such things without enough thought might have got mired in some other nonsense anyway.
- mrkeen 3y ago
  I thought the same thing about Facebook and "move fast and break things" !
leetrout 3y ago
Can you say more about this? Was Go inspired / derived from the use of sawzall and it just performs its intended uses in other parts of the company?
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Go was designed specifically as a better C++ (that is, a better successor to C). Its use as a Sawzall replacement was a lucky accident, I think -- that just happened to be the first niche where it took hold. Sawzall was not a widely-liked language, so people had already been trying to replace it with Python, but Go had better performance and stronger typing so it was a better fit. Go really found its footing as a better Python (for some use cases) rather than a better C++.
nadermx 3y ago
That really depends on how beneficial the things they use golang for are. Hard to quantify if it allowed for large benefit in say YouTube or such
Thaxll 3y ago
How do you know about the cost? Do you have numbers? It's the root of many core and used services.
paulddraper 3y ago
You won't be writing Go?
- rrdharan 3y ago
  You might be, but as the parent said, it’s not likely. I think that’s a fair statement, out of 100K engineers or whatever it is, I’d estimate less than 10K of them are writing primarily golang code.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    What do you base that estimate on?
    - rrdharan 3y ago
      I didn’t pull any stats but I’ve been working at Google for most of the last 10 years (in two stints). And actually I think even 10K is a very generous upper bound, really if I were betting money I’d peg it at like maybe 2000 engineers that use golang as their primary language and a big chunk of those are SWE-SRE? There's just _way_ more Java and C++ than there is golang…
    - bananapub 3y ago
      on the fact that most of the code in prod isn't Go. anyone working there can look at the CL statistics dashboard to see what's being written, and a different dashboard to see the distribution of binary sources. Go is very popular in some niches (a semi-mandate in SRE produced a bunch of it) and not used at all elsewhere.
dummyvariable 3y ago
This in incorrect, I have been at Google more then 5 years and the work has been in go. Most of the teams around me use go as well. But this is not to say that there is lesser java/cpp use.
- rrdharan 3y ago
  Your experience doesn’t invalidate the likeliness part of the parent comment. You just happen to be in the subset / cluster / areas that write in golang. Probabilistically speaking across the entire Google engineering population both you and the teams around you are outliers. That doesn’t mean golang is insignificant. As to whether golang was worth it I disagree with the parent, I think it was probably worth the resources invested, even if e.g. usage has leveled off internally, but at any rate this is a hard thing to measure so we’re all just opining.
yegle 3y ago
I think this is easy to verify w/o resort to anecdotes. There's an (easy to find) internal dashboard with language metrics, showing the number of CLs (changelists) breaking down by languages and the team.

scythe 3y ago

A friend of mine who works for Google noted that they hardly use Go internally, and quipped, "Google invented Go to sabotage its competitors."

erik_seaberg 3y ago
That used to be the joke about open sourcing GCL and borgmon, I guess some of which ended up in k8s. Good luck out there!
- bananapub 3y ago
  or as actually happened, jsonnet and prometheus! I still wonder how many potential competitors the mapreduce and bigtable papers eliminated. perhaps it doesn't matter since the people that blindly adopted such things without enough thought might have got mired in some other nonsense anyway.
mrkeen 3y ago
I thought the same thing about Facebook and "move fast and break things" !

leetrout 3y ago

Can you say more about this? Was Go inspired / derived from the use of sawzall and it just performs its intended uses in other parts of the company?

iainmerrick 3y ago
Go was designed specifically as a better C++ (that is, a better successor to C). Its use as a Sawzall replacement was a lucky accident, I think -- that just happened to be the first niche where it took hold. Sawzall was not a widely-liked language, so people had already been trying to replace it with Python, but Go had better performance and stronger typing so it was a better fit. Go really found its footing as a better Python (for some use cases) rather than a better C++.

nadermx 3y ago

That really depends on how beneficial the things they use golang for are. Hard to quantify if it allowed for large benefit in say YouTube or such

Thaxll 3y ago

How do you know about the cost? Do you have numbers? It's the root of many core and used services.

paulddraper 3y ago

You won't be writing Go?

rrdharan 3y ago
You might be, but as the parent said, it’s not likely. I think that’s a fair statement, out of 100K engineers or whatever it is, I’d estimate less than 10K of them are writing primarily golang code.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  What do you base that estimate on?
  - rrdharan 3y ago
    I didn’t pull any stats but I’ve been working at Google for most of the last 10 years (in two stints). And actually I think even 10K is a very generous upper bound, really if I were betting money I’d peg it at like maybe 2000 engineers that use golang as their primary language and a big chunk of those are SWE-SRE? There's just _way_ more Java and C++ than there is golang…
  - bananapub 3y ago
    on the fact that most of the code in prod isn't Go. anyone working there can look at the CL statistics dashboard to see what's being written, and a different dashboard to see the distribution of binary sources. Go is very popular in some niches (a semi-mandate in SRE produced a bunch of it) and not used at all elsewhere.

dummyvariable 3y ago

This in incorrect, I have been at Google more then 5 years and the work has been in go. Most of the teams around me use go as well. But this is not to say that there is lesser java/cpp use.

rrdharan 3y ago
Your experience doesn’t invalidate the likeliness part of the parent comment. You just happen to be in the subset / cluster / areas that write in golang. Probabilistically speaking across the entire Google engineering population both you and the teams around you are outliers. That doesn’t mean golang is insignificant. As to whether golang was worth it I disagree with the parent, I think it was probably worth the resources invested, even if e.g. usage has leveled off internally, but at any rate this is a hard thing to measure so we’re all just opining.

yegle 3y ago

I think this is easy to verify w/o resort to anecdotes. There's an (easy to find) internal dashboard with language metrics, showing the number of CLs (changelists) breaking down by languages and the team.