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Comment by EwanToo | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how heavily used Go is inside Google (as they are the core developers), does anyone know the approximate ratio of languages used there?

Is Go one of the top 3 languages with Java and JavaScript, or is Python or something else more significant.

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One of the things that sold me on Go was this slidedeck (back in 2013 -- wow!): https://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-dl.slide#1

TL;DR: Discusses how Google engineers replaced the download server written in C++ with one written in Go, and analyzes the reasons why. It's pretty cool.

My understanding is that it's not that significant in terms of lines of code in the codebase, but it is significant in terms of its official support and its rate of growth.

C++ is definitely in top 3, along with Java.

Top 3 languages at Google are certainly Java, JavaScript and C++.

Heard people are using Go for scripting in Google? Which is pretty counter-intuitive for me.

Hrm. That is stretching the definition of scripting quite a bit. No REPL and clearly lower level than shell, Perl, Python, Ruby, no dynamic typing, etc. Not knocking golang at all, but "scripting"?

I would agree that some problems solved by scripting could/should be replaced with something more precise. But golang wouldn't be a great fill in for true scripting needs.

Well if you had to write a highly concurrent script, like to test a network or something, Go would be a good fit.

I cannot tell you what's the no. 3 language used by humans, but it's not go, not python...

I heard from a guy who heard from a guy that go was replacing as much python as possible and people were upset about it

I think Dart probably has more lines of code at Google than Go has. Purely speculative.

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