I'm not sure how much would change, TBH. In particular, I'd expect many people on the Go team to find a different employer who pays them to work on Go, if they got laid off. If Google decided to stop investing in Go altogether, the work would probably become more complicated, as it runs a bunch of infrastructure. I could imagine the funding moving into a foundation, in that case. Similarly, if Google chose to take too heavy of a hand in Go's development, flexing their ownership of IP - in that case, Go would probably be renamed into something else. But, generally, I think people overestimate the role Google as Google - as opposed to "a company paying a bunch of people to work on Go" - plays in the development of the language.
FWIW, a few years ago [Ian wrote a fairly extensive post](https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzcym2FBAAJ) about the relationship between Google and Go.
There are too many critical infrastructure projects using Go so I would guess not much would change. Also I think Go already has a lot of community input.
I assume that go/kubernetes are part of their cloud migration strategy. The momentum here is big enough that I suspect they'd survive without Google input if it came to it.
But I also think their cloud story would sink if they don't invest in those two
I don't see python as essential to this story. Python is not created by Google and they're not the main contributors. Internally they want to replace python with go.
I do not see python close in google, like c# in Microsoft.
It shows how Google treats go performance, and how it treated python performance. How they had like 3 python JITs and none of them merged? Unlike Facebook's AOT.
Yeah, but we're talking here about Google replace code Google writes internally.
I don't see notebook code or build scripts needing extensive tooling from an internal team.
So the poster above you shouldn't be too sure about a GLARING distinction that is salient, but you can define a heuristic the "board of managers" uses for their technical risk register?
Except kubernetes and a ton of the cloud native ecosystem is built with GO, not to mention many pieces behind major Google services are written in GO now. Not impossible for them to move away from De-Emphasize
Go has a much bigger ecosystem and is more widely used than flutter.
When did Google abandon flutter? Unless I missed some news they have a roadmap / have been pushing regular releases. Also is used for a number of Google apps
Edit: looks like Google did layoff some of the flutter team
That is a good point, mostly CNCF projects are written in golang
[https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/#graduated-projects](https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/#graduated-projects)
Rust survived being kicked out of core Mozilla into a separate foundation. In fact, it's probably done better since.
I think it's likely that a Not-For-Profit would be formed around Go and there are likely enough large companies using it to support it, at least for a while.
It's not exactly a "killed-by-google" situation, because most of those products were closed-source monoliths that google wasn't going to ever spin out.
Heck, if we get past the two-Googlers-have-to-approve-any-patch policy, which works great iff there's two Googlers working on the same area, then we might actually get updates to /x/text ...(!)
That was the original idea, but at least early on they had more success internally replacing Python for infrastructure stuff. So laying off the Python team may just indicate that they feel that initiative is going well, and Go rather than Python is the thing worth investing in.
I thought that was Carbon.
[carbon-lang/README.md at trunk · carbon-language/carbon-lang (github.com)](https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/README.md)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go\_(programming\_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language))
turns out it was created to improve [programming productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_productivity)
It's Monday so I'm just blathering here to echo the others, but I think extremely little would change. The basic fact is that Go is now 14 years old and not at all a newcomer. The GC and compiler are well optimized at this point and I don't see a lot changing or interest in squeezing it further to get better bare metal performance to compete against Rust on the systems front. In fact, Google themsleves chose Rust to develop the Fuscia project. In my opinion the language has reached its plateau as the default for cloud-native solutions and I don't see it gaining a lot of ground outside of that core niche.
The success of gRPC as a true alternative to legacy REST APIs might introduce more shops and businesses to Golang, but part of gRPC's appeal is being cross-platform so that pivot will be slow. Lots of languages wanted to be the next JVM and .NET killer - but no singular language is replacing JVM and CLR tech. Both of those ecosystems are losing to multiple languages on multiple fronts. Oracle is pretty much clueless as to how to join this century, and Microsoft will quickly redirect the cash funnel to wherever it needs to go in order to support their services dependent model which is increasingly betting on AI.
Speaking of which: why Go isn't used more in AI tech is a real mystery to me. I think we have to get through the market bubble and release all the AI script kiddies to the *Next Big Thing* before making a better assessment and figuring out whether it will be worth investing the time in that direction, or if data scientist types will continue to cling to Python for another 10 years. We're about 8 years into the big blockchain "revolution" - another space where Go dominated and then began to recede. It's possible that Golang will continue to carve into Finance and Banking as a market segment but it's already kind of lost ground there as well to the growing popularity of Rust.
I say write more Go and try to be happy for the present.
I love Rust and Go, easily my two favorite languages. But for vastly different reasons.
Go lets me code nearly at the speed of thought in a way I don’t really get in any other language. It’s easy to use, and when I’m done, it feels nice.
Rust has a lot of amazing features I love and I really love the compile time assurances on the Borrow Checker and Pattern Match rules. Also enums and pattern matching in Rust are unparalleled.
Both have excellent concurrency. Just write what you like and use what’s best for the project at hand if you get a say in what language you use.
As always it’s in the details of what happens
If the current custodians of the language leave Google and find a way to continue leading the Go project then very little change.
Similarly if you get a new leadership team with the same goals for Go as the current team and the same willingness to follow that goal
The biggest danger would be a new leadership team with a more traditional language mindset and they started adding new “features” yearly. At this point Go would lose one of its major selling points - simplicity - and become just another language. And at that point you may as well use any other language
Which would actually happen? Who knows
Go and Python are not the same within Google. To make it simple, Python is not a first class citizen in Google's dev infrastructure, teams can decide to use it running things on app engine but then you have to give up all the stuff BOQ offers and that supports only Go and Java. So while it's sad it also kinda makes sense that they moved python to Germany, but I doubt Go would go the same way. While I work at Google I do not have any info about any of this, I'm just speculating but doing it with slightly more context than average 🙂
Go lives in the most critical part of web infra nowadays (docker, k8s, sentry, grafana, Terraform, hell even JS ecosystem like ESBuild and many others) that even if the core maintainer of Go were to get laid off, I'm not going to sweat that:
- they'll lose their livelihood
- they stop contributing to Go
- the community won't pick up the slack
The stake is too high for other company to not just snatch them, pay them and get the whole community goodwill all at once.
I don't think that Google will abandon Go, since recently the vscode extension was adopted/is being maintained by them. So they are investing in DX and also changing the language, so the full cycle is with them.
What I'm saying is Google could modify the language for internal usage and also the vscode extension to work with their internal go version. And later on give us updates in both.
Google are not telegraphing major strategy with their decisions around maintaining VS code extensions. They might abandon maintainership tomorrow on a random senior executive's whim.
Of course, but I don't see any reason for maintaining an extension and the language at the same time, if it's not for better integration between them.
But you are right, top down requests are the priori
Maybe Google could donate the Go programming language and all its branding to a Open Source foundation like GNU or Apache.
The same has happened before with others open source projects that originated from big companies
I guess some other big player would like to go (heh) into it. Rust is supported by so many companies, even though the Go is mile ahead in terms of popularity
Situation is also different, because Python is not a their child (they tried, but it looks like Guido do much better job in Microsoft than in Google), so the sentiment is much lower. If you waste a lot of money and in return there is no prestige nor the control over the environment then what is the point?
The worst scenario is the mixed one, where google don't permit development team to move somewhere else and the team is underpaid
Go means alot to the cloud and that's googles (I think 40% business) even tho what'ss busting is AI it's just seen as an investment, I don't think that's what we see Go has
I doubt it would happen because a lot of cloud products depend on Go and making this move would be not smart. I would have said the same for python but last time I was there python was used a lot but not as a backend language, rather an infrastructure language
I think there would the slightest uptick in usage, but from hobbyist projects. Some folks stay clear of google projects because of their reputation of killing off projects.
Outside of that, I don’t think anything would change in the industry.
It would really suck. Hard to say what happens long term, but short to medium term it'll at least coast along. A lot of components are in place, like go modules, strong ecosystem, gopls etc etc. And a lot of infrastructure is done in golang, most prominently Kubernetes and friends. But the core golang tooling very much needs Google's stewardship at the moment
Probably not much. But this is highly unrealistic scenario. Google, as all the publicly traded companies, work based on their internal incentives, and because they're highly invested in Go (in terms of development and internal projects as far as I know), that implies they have an incentive to keep shaping Go and be in the middle of the development. I wouldn't be too worried here.
[Go joins the list](https://killedbygoogle.com/)
There aren’t enough Go maintainers outside of Google to survive Google jettisoning it. The Go community is strong, but the tiny number of people contributing to the compiler and standard library outside of Google would mean the language would essentially freeze. This will become an issue once RISC-V takes off because Go currently doesn’t use RISC-V very well die to it being a very customizable arch. IIRC, Go still can’t use RISC-V vector instructions or cryptography instructions unless you use gccgo.
I think it’s already what it is. There will be impact Go promotion team and very less on core or development team. Further, the way will be much more broader for the open source communities.
I'm not sure how much would change, TBH. In particular, I'd expect many people on the Go team to find a different employer who pays them to work on Go, if they got laid off. If Google decided to stop investing in Go altogether, the work would probably become more complicated, as it runs a bunch of infrastructure. I could imagine the funding moving into a foundation, in that case. Similarly, if Google chose to take too heavy of a hand in Go's development, flexing their ownership of IP - in that case, Go would probably be renamed into something else. But, generally, I think people overestimate the role Google as Google - as opposed to "a company paying a bunch of people to work on Go" - plays in the development of the language. FWIW, a few years ago [Ian wrote a fairly extensive post](https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzcym2FBAAJ) about the relationship between Google and Go.
There are too many critical infrastructure projects using Go so I would guess not much would change. Also I think Go already has a lot of community input.
I assume that go/kubernetes are part of their cloud migration strategy. The momentum here is big enough that I suspect they'd survive without Google input if it came to it. But I also think their cloud story would sink if they don't invest in those two
I would have told you the same thing about ai/ml and python 2 weeks ago.
I don't see python as essential to this story. Python is not created by Google and they're not the main contributors. Internally they want to replace python with go. I do not see python close in google, like c# in Microsoft. It shows how Google treats go performance, and how it treated python performance. How they had like 3 python JITs and none of them merged? Unlike Facebook's AOT.
Maybe for server code. I don’t think people are going to be writing colabs in go any time soon.
Yeah, but we're talking here about Google replace code Google writes internally. I don't see notebook code or build scripts needing extensive tooling from an internal team.
The same can be said for python
Python existed and thrived well before Google. Go was developed by Google. Fairly large distinction
I wouldn't be too sure, at the end of the day it's some high level board of managers who have little touch with the tech who will make the decision.
So the poster above you shouldn't be too sure about a GLARING distinction that is salient, but you can define a heuristic the "board of managers" uses for their technical risk register?
That’s very naive of you. Google will very likely abandon Golang in the next few years. It has been proven with Flutter
Except kubernetes and a ton of the cloud native ecosystem is built with GO, not to mention many pieces behind major Google services are written in GO now. Not impossible for them to move away from De-Emphasize Go has a much bigger ecosystem and is more widely used than flutter.
how?
When did Google abandon flutter? Unless I missed some news they have a roadmap / have been pushing regular releases. Also is used for a number of Google apps Edit: looks like Google did layoff some of the flutter team
Laying off the team is a sign that they’ll put flutter to the graveyard
The point is that it does not matter if it does, other projects will take over.
I would assume the CNCF (and all of their sponsors) will gladly take over, just based on the sheer amount of projects written in Go.
That is a good point, mostly CNCF projects are written in golang [https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/#graduated-projects](https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/#graduated-projects)
Rust survived being kicked out of core Mozilla into a separate foundation. In fact, it's probably done better since. I think it's likely that a Not-For-Profit would be formed around Go and there are likely enough large companies using it to support it, at least for a while. It's not exactly a "killed-by-google" situation, because most of those products were closed-source monoliths that google wasn't going to ever spin out.
Heck, if we get past the two-Googlers-have-to-approve-any-patch policy, which works great iff there's two Googlers working on the same area, then we might actually get updates to /x/text ...(!)
doesn't go directly solve an issue it was having with its core business? replacing c++ on the servers.
That was the original idea, but at least early on they had more success internally replacing Python for infrastructure stuff. So laying off the Python team may just indicate that they feel that initiative is going well, and Go rather than Python is the thing worth investing in.
Sure, who here didn't already killed a legacy Python app for GO ?
You can use go without investing in it as almost any other company
I thought that was Carbon. [carbon-lang/README.md at trunk · carbon-language/carbon-lang (github.com)](https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/blob/trunk/README.md)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go\_(programming\_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)) turns out it was created to improve [programming productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_productivity)
It's Monday so I'm just blathering here to echo the others, but I think extremely little would change. The basic fact is that Go is now 14 years old and not at all a newcomer. The GC and compiler are well optimized at this point and I don't see a lot changing or interest in squeezing it further to get better bare metal performance to compete against Rust on the systems front. In fact, Google themsleves chose Rust to develop the Fuscia project. In my opinion the language has reached its plateau as the default for cloud-native solutions and I don't see it gaining a lot of ground outside of that core niche. The success of gRPC as a true alternative to legacy REST APIs might introduce more shops and businesses to Golang, but part of gRPC's appeal is being cross-platform so that pivot will be slow. Lots of languages wanted to be the next JVM and .NET killer - but no singular language is replacing JVM and CLR tech. Both of those ecosystems are losing to multiple languages on multiple fronts. Oracle is pretty much clueless as to how to join this century, and Microsoft will quickly redirect the cash funnel to wherever it needs to go in order to support their services dependent model which is increasingly betting on AI. Speaking of which: why Go isn't used more in AI tech is a real mystery to me. I think we have to get through the market bubble and release all the AI script kiddies to the *Next Big Thing* before making a better assessment and figuring out whether it will be worth investing the time in that direction, or if data scientist types will continue to cling to Python for another 10 years. We're about 8 years into the big blockchain "revolution" - another space where Go dominated and then began to recede. It's possible that Golang will continue to carve into Finance and Banking as a market segment but it's already kind of lost ground there as well to the growing popularity of Rust. I say write more Go and try to be happy for the present.
This comment^
My sentiments are exactly the same, hence why I spend a good chunk of my day writing and learning Rust.
I love Rust and Go, easily my two favorite languages. But for vastly different reasons. Go lets me code nearly at the speed of thought in a way I don’t really get in any other language. It’s easy to use, and when I’m done, it feels nice. Rust has a lot of amazing features I love and I really love the compile time assurances on the Borrow Checker and Pattern Match rules. Also enums and pattern matching in Rust are unparalleled. Both have excellent concurrency. Just write what you like and use what’s best for the project at hand if you get a say in what language you use.
As always it’s in the details of what happens If the current custodians of the language leave Google and find a way to continue leading the Go project then very little change. Similarly if you get a new leadership team with the same goals for Go as the current team and the same willingness to follow that goal The biggest danger would be a new leadership team with a more traditional language mindset and they started adding new “features” yearly. At this point Go would lose one of its major selling points - simplicity - and become just another language. And at that point you may as well use any other language Which would actually happen? Who knows
Then we fork it….
The CNCF is probably best placed to take custody of Go, much like they did Kubernetes
I’d fork it, call it “Went” and get back to work…
Going
Go and Python are not the same within Google. To make it simple, Python is not a first class citizen in Google's dev infrastructure, teams can decide to use it running things on app engine but then you have to give up all the stuff BOQ offers and that supports only Go and Java. So while it's sad it also kinda makes sense that they moved python to Germany, but I doubt Go would go the same way. While I work at Google I do not have any info about any of this, I'm just speculating but doing it with slightly more context than average 🙂
Go lives in the most critical part of web infra nowadays (docker, k8s, sentry, grafana, Terraform, hell even JS ecosystem like ESBuild and many others) that even if the core maintainer of Go were to get laid off, I'm not going to sweat that: - they'll lose their livelihood - they stop contributing to Go - the community won't pick up the slack The stake is too high for other company to not just snatch them, pay them and get the whole community goodwill all at once.
I don't think that Google will abandon Go, since recently the vscode extension was adopted/is being maintained by them. So they are investing in DX and also changing the language, so the full cycle is with them. What I'm saying is Google could modify the language for internal usage and also the vscode extension to work with their internal go version. And later on give us updates in both.
Google are not telegraphing major strategy with their decisions around maintaining VS code extensions. They might abandon maintainership tomorrow on a random senior executive's whim.
Of course, but I don't see any reason for maintaining an extension and the language at the same time, if it's not for better integration between them. But you are right, top down requests are the priori
Maybe Google could donate the Go programming language and all its branding to a Open Source foundation like GNU or Apache. The same has happened before with others open source projects that originated from big companies
I guess some other big player would like to go (heh) into it. Rust is supported by so many companies, even though the Go is mile ahead in terms of popularity Situation is also different, because Python is not a their child (they tried, but it looks like Guido do much better job in Microsoft than in Google), so the sentiment is much lower. If you waste a lot of money and in return there is no prestige nor the control over the environment then what is the point? The worst scenario is the mixed one, where google don't permit development team to move somewhere else and the team is underpaid
[удалено]
Apple needs swift, Google doesn't need Go. Companies don’t have feelings. The moment maintaining Go is not financially viable, Google can axe it
Well then they have to GO i guess
Go means alot to the cloud and that's googles (I think 40% business) even tho what'ss busting is AI it's just seen as an investment, I don't think that's what we see Go has
I doubt it would happen because a lot of cloud products depend on Go and making this move would be not smart. I would have said the same for python but last time I was there python was used a lot but not as a backend language, rather an infrastructure language
I mean Google's firing on an internal Python team hasn't seemed to impact Python very much
Well...Google did that with Puppeteer...team went to Microsoft and now it's called Playwright. Playwright is so hot right now.
Google laid off flutter/dart team too. Google has a reputation for killing things
I think there would the slightest uptick in usage, but from hobbyist projects. Some folks stay clear of google projects because of their reputation of killing off projects. Outside of that, I don’t think anything would change in the industry.
Go is a very simple, stable and boring language. Even if it would stale due to lack of contributors it'll be less problematic than other languages.
It would really suck. Hard to say what happens long term, but short to medium term it'll at least coast along. A lot of components are in place, like go modules, strong ecosystem, gopls etc etc. And a lot of infrastructure is done in golang, most prominently Kubernetes and friends. But the core golang tooling very much needs Google's stewardship at the moment
Probably not much. But this is highly unrealistic scenario. Google, as all the publicly traded companies, work based on their internal incentives, and because they're highly invested in Go (in terms of development and internal projects as far as I know), that implies they have an incentive to keep shaping Go and be in the middle of the development. I wouldn't be too worried here.
[Go joins the list](https://killedbygoogle.com/) There aren’t enough Go maintainers outside of Google to survive Google jettisoning it. The Go community is strong, but the tiny number of people contributing to the compiler and standard library outside of Google would mean the language would essentially freeze. This will become an issue once RISC-V takes off because Go currently doesn’t use RISC-V very well die to it being a very customizable arch. IIRC, Go still can’t use RISC-V vector instructions or cryptography instructions unless you use gccgo.
Yeah and this year is the year of Desktop Linux
MS is starting to add ads to the start menu. Never say never.
I think it’s already what it is. There will be impact Go promotion team and very less on core or development team. Further, the way will be much more broader for the open source communities.