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I'm curious if we can draw any comparisons to what Google is doing with Go and what Sun Microsystems did with Java, as far as a corporation supporting developme

I'm curious if we can draw any comparisons to what Google is doing with Go and what Sun Microsystems did with Java, as far as a corporation supporting development of a language goes? How many resources did Sun allocate to developing and supporting Java? EDIT: One of the things that excites me about Go as opposed to something like Ruby on Rails or node.js (V8, aside) is that Google is behind it.

mjcohenw 14y ago
Google is behind it this year. Next year, who knows?
sigzero 14y ago
Sun pushed Java for everything and everyone one. Go was built to solve problems at Google. If they solve your problem, cool, but that isn't (or wasn't) the goal.
- mortdeus 14y ago
  Go was built to solve problems like the ones faced at google. However, go can solve just about any theoretical computational problem C can.
cygwin98 14y ago
Don't count on it.
enneff 14y ago
Google is committed to Go. We already run a bunch of stuff written in Go, and continue to throw more engineers at improving the Go ecosystem inside the company. But Google's relationship with Go is not the same as Sun's was with Java. Sun made Java a core part of their business strategy. With Go, Google isn't getting into the language business, but rather supporting an ambitious open source project that suits Google's needs internally. As an open source project, Go has been quite successful so far. While the main driving force comes from the team at Google (we are employed to do this, after all), there are now more committers to the Go core from outside Google than within.
mortdeus 14y ago
Its best to think of google as the main sponsor of Go. Kinda like how apple is the main sponsor of LLVM. Go is a completely opensource commit-reviewed driven project. Developers from other companies other than Google have commit permissions and there arent any situations where go team works in house on the language for 6 months then throws all their commits over the wall. Also go is at heart a language specification. It is designed so that anybody can create their own go compiler, and as long as they honor the go spec and standard library, all go code should theoretically compile with your custom compiler. There are already a few other compilers in development out there. Gccgo is a go compiler with gcc as a bankend. llgo is similar except its frontend is written in go and uses cgo to wrap the LLVM C wrapper api to generate llvm bitcode. Im starting to reimplementing the official go gc and cc compilers written in go for my port of plan9's userland shell commands called goblin. https://github.com/mortdeus/goblin https://github.com/mortdeus/goblin In my opinion this is the core difference between java and go. Oracle believes they own java and will fight against projects derived from java, for example the lawsuit against dalvik. Google on the other hand is open to projects like the ones I mentioned above.

mjcohenw 14y ago

Google is behind it this year. Next year, who knows?

sigzero 14y ago

Sun pushed Java for everything and everyone one. Go was built to solve problems at Google. If they solve your problem, cool, but that isn't (or wasn't) the goal.

mortdeus 14y ago
Go was built to solve problems like the ones faced at google. However, go can solve just about any theoretical computational problem C can.

cygwin98 14y ago

Don't count on it.

enneff 14y ago

Google is committed to Go. We already run a bunch of stuff written in Go, and continue to throw more engineers at improving the Go ecosystem inside the company. But Google's relationship with Go is not the same as Sun's was with Java. Sun made Java a core part of their business strategy. With Go, Google isn't getting into the language business, but rather supporting an ambitious open source project that suits Google's needs internally. As an open source project, Go has been quite successful so far. While the main driving force comes from the team at Google (we are employed to do this, after all), there are now more committers to the Go core from outside Google than within.

mortdeus 14y ago

Its best to think of google as the main sponsor of Go. Kinda like how apple is the main sponsor of LLVM. Go is a completely opensource commit-reviewed driven project. Developers from other companies other than Google have commit permissions and there arent any situations where go team works in house on the language for 6 months then throws all their commits over the wall. Also go is at heart a language specification. It is designed so that anybody can create their own go compiler, and as long as they honor the go spec and standard library, all go code should theoretically compile with your custom compiler. There are already a few other compilers in development out there. Gccgo is a go compiler with gcc as a bankend. llgo is similar except its frontend is written in go and uses cgo to wrap the LLVM C wrapper api to generate llvm bitcode. Im starting to reimplementing the official go gc and cc compilers written in go for my port of plan9's userland shell commands called goblin. https://github.com/mortdeus/goblin https://github.com/mortdeus/goblin In my opinion this is the core difference between java and go. Oracle believes they own java and will fight against projects derived from java, for example the lawsuit against dalvik. Google on the other hand is open to projects like the ones I mentioned above.