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> Go was merely started by some a team working at Google as a side project History shows that a lot of extremely successful things started out that way. > and

> Go was merely started by some a team working at Google as a side project History shows that a lot of extremely successful things started out that way. > and it grew a little from there That's a bit of an understatement. Go has hundreds of contributors, and is already used by thousands of companies. > They do pay several people to work on it nowadays, but it's not some "bet the company" language. Definitely not. For that matter, neither is Dart. > Also, Google hasn't mandated replacing any C++/Java stuff with Go, and nobody is touching their search engine code. If it happens, it happens organically and for lesser stuff. You make it sound like Go isn't being used at Google, which is disingenuous. No, it probably hasn't replaced the crawler and pagerank logic--it'd be silly to rewrite all of that--but it is continuously being picked for new projects internally. Some of the few such projects that have become public are Vitess, the database frontend that powers YouTube, and the code that powers dl.google.com. (That there is no known mandate to replace existing code isn't indicative of much. It's a bad move to rewrite that much code for any reason.) > Second, Go was developed for "systems" software (albeit in the sense of network servers and such), not search specifically. It started out as a "systems language" (which roughly translates to "for writing backend software", but was commonly misunderstood), however that description has been removed since Go has proved useful in other areas. It is now simply a general-purpose programming language.

coldtea 13y ago
>>Go was merely started by some a team working at Google as a side project >History shows that a lot of extremely successful things started out that way. Also a lot of failures. But both cases are beside the point. I didn't correct him on whether Go is good or not. Just in that it was not started officially by Google. >That's a bit of an understatement. Go has hundreds of contributors, and is already used by thousands of companies. And yet it's still a totally marginal language in the grand scheme of things. Not even 1/100 of what something like Java or .NET is, for example. >Definitely not. For that matter, neither is Dart. Agreed on Dart (and I don't think I said it was). But .NET and Java were. >You make it sound like Go isn't being used at Google, which is disingenuous. No, it probably hasn't replaced the crawler and pagerank logic--it'd be silly to rewrite all of that--but it is continuously being picked for new projects internally. Some of the few such projects that have become public are Vitess, the database frontend that powers YouTube, and the code that powers dl.google.com. Yes, I've read about both, I follow Go since the beginning. Those two quite humble projects are the only things that have become publicly known for 2 years now. A db load balancer (which had some Go issues they had to code around even), and an abandoned part of Google infrastructure in C++ that a Go team member volunteered to rewrite in Go. >however that description has been removed since Go has proved useful in other areas. It is now simply a general-purpose programming language. I believe the reason it that description has been removed was because people complained that "systems software" means specifically OSs, drivers and such, not just backend software.
millstone 13y ago
> It started out as a "systems language" (which roughly translates to "for writing backend software", Not really. While Go was presented as suitable for writing classically backend software like databases, it was also presented as suitable for writing compilers, programming tools, debuggers, IDEs, and web browsers, none of which are "backend software."
- thirsteh 13y ago
  Yeah, that's what I meant by "roughly." I was trying to point out that a lot of people assumed "systems" meant "kernel/real-time development", which Go, while not decidedly bad, is not that well-suited for.

coldtea 13y ago

>>Go was merely started by some a team working at Google as a side project >History shows that a lot of extremely successful things started out that way. Also a lot of failures. But both cases are beside the point. I didn't correct him on whether Go is good or not. Just in that it was not started officially by Google. >That's a bit of an understatement. Go has hundreds of contributors, and is already used by thousands of companies. And yet it's still a totally marginal language in the grand scheme of things. Not even 1/100 of what something like Java or .NET is, for example. >Definitely not. For that matter, neither is Dart. Agreed on Dart (and I don't think I said it was). But .NET and Java were. >You make it sound like Go isn't being used at Google, which is disingenuous. No, it probably hasn't replaced the crawler and pagerank logic--it'd be silly to rewrite all of that--but it is continuously being picked for new projects internally. Some of the few such projects that have become public are Vitess, the database frontend that powers YouTube, and the code that powers dl.google.com. Yes, I've read about both, I follow Go since the beginning. Those two quite humble projects are the only things that have become publicly known for 2 years now. A db load balancer (which had some Go issues they had to code around even), and an abandoned part of Google infrastructure in C++ that a Go team member volunteered to rewrite in Go. >however that description has been removed since Go has proved useful in other areas. It is now simply a general-purpose programming language. I believe the reason it that description has been removed was because people complained that "systems software" means specifically OSs, drivers and such, not just backend software.

millstone 13y ago

> It started out as a "systems language" (which roughly translates to "for writing backend software", Not really. While Go was presented as suitable for writing classically backend software like databases, it was also presented as suitable for writing compilers, programming tools, debuggers, IDEs, and web browsers, none of which are "backend software."

thirsteh 13y ago
Yeah, that's what I meant by "roughly." I was trying to point out that a lot of people assumed "systems" meant "kernel/real-time development", which Go, while not decidedly bad, is not that well-suited for.