Go.dev: a new hub for Go developers | Hacker News Reader

Go.dev: a new hub for Go developers

blog.golang.org

130 points0xmohit27 comments

The part I'm most excited about here is the pkg.go.dev site, which is basically a module-aware godoc.org server!

For months now, the godocs for Caddy 2 (in beta) have been inaccessible, but now you can read the godocs for every specific tag of Caddy: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/caddyserver/caddy/v2@v2.0.0-be...

That's really, really a game-changer in my opinion. All the trouble transitioning to modules is starting to become worth it!

In the long term, do we think godoc.org is going to go away?

Eventually, we plan to redirect godoc.org requests to the equivalent pkg.go.dev URL. We will make sure not to break godoc.org links!

Cool - This new package browser is definitely "viable", in fact it's very nice.

This is... strange? It seems go.dev is a enterprisey marketing hub (with "Solutions" and "Case Studies" and "Testimonials"), while golang.org remains the pure, text-based, engineer-focused home of the language itself.

I can't think of another language that splits its official web presence across separate domains like this. Rust (rust-lang.org), Python (python.org), Ruby (ruby-lang.org) all have sections dedicated to marketing/eduction (usually "Community" or "Success Stories" tabs), as well as hosting the language reference, documentation, and downloads.

The result sure is confusing. Why aren't the blog and playground hosted on go.dev, for example? I can only imagine this is the result of internal politics at Google; it sure smells like the Go team engineers didn't want the growing Go marketing division to corrupt golang.org.

The post seems to indicate that go.dev will also have documentation the way that godoc.org has. I think this site looks much more like it would if Go were a community-run project.

its at https://pkg.go.dev

Honestly, this split is a great idea IMHO. Gatsby did that a while back as well. Gophers are cute, that's for sure - but a "clean" appearance like that of the new site is neat for whenever you want to pitch Go to a non-technical person. Keep the marketing teams out of documentation is what I'm trying to say.

Why does Go need marketing and what does marketing have to do with third party packages?

I'm confused as well. It seems like this website is there to sell me something in pursuit of business goals. What business goals are discussed at Google for Go's future?

It's a new playground; for consultants.

>This is... strange? It seems go.dev is a enterprisey marketing hub (with "Solutions" and "Case Studies" and "Testimonials"), while golang.org remains the pure, text-based, engineer-focused home of the language itself.

Given that go.dev registrar is MarkMonitor and not Google itself I think is safe to assume this isn't an initiative led by Google.

go.dev is in fact led and implemented by the core team at Google, though perhaps only incidentally.

Many large companies use MarkMonitor to register their domains.

No, it's an official Google project. Here is the official Google announcement by a Google employee: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-announce/OW8b...

I don't understand this at all. How is this for developers?. The first screenshot of the main page is half logos/ads for companies using go. If I'm a developer using this is meaningless to me.

The first link in the navigation "Solutions" brings you to another page that is completely filled with pointless logos of companies using go. And then if you click on one of the 4 "solutions" you get taken to ANOTHER page with company logos. I DON'T CARE!!! Get that noise out of there.

> Clicking on Explore brings you to pkg.go.dev

What?! I would have never guessed that. Why isn't the link just "Packages" then? "Explore" means nothing to me as a developer. Naming is one of the hardest problems in computer science and you already had a good name (it's in the URL!), why create another meaningless name?

As a developer I can say this web site isn't targeted at me. And to be honest, I don't know who the target is. Is it for developers who aren't go developers? Is it for go developers? As a non-go developer, this site doesn't encourage me to want to use go. And as a go developer I don't want to have to sift through meaningless marketing speak, testimonials, and company logos. I'm already using the damn language!

Can't all the company logos and testimonials be moved to a section called "Case studies" instead of being littered all over adding noise?

All I want to know is who is the target audience for this?

> All I want to know is who is the target audience for this?

I imagine these pages are intended for someone who's interested in Go but wants to know more. I know plenty of people who base their decision entirely on what companies have had the most success when picking a programming language to learn. I think these pages satisfy the questions of "Who uses Go? What do they use it for? What did their success look like afterward?"

The package explorer does add some confusion for me though. The site otherwise seems entirely geared toward people who are curious about Go.

> I imagine these pages are intended for someone who's interested in Go but wants to know more

But the title literally says "a new hub for Go developers".

I appreciate the design and marketing effort, but the split between golang.org and go.dev, and godoc.org and pkg.go.dev, is confusing. Newcomers may wonder what is the official website.

pkg.go.dev has no apparent way to browse the standard packages that I can see, just this awfully useless split between popular packages and featured packages, both of which are never useful to me if I want to discover what's in the standard library or what's out in external packages that solves certain problems. Search is an abysmal user experience here. Discoverability should take priority.

You can view the list of standard library packages at https://pkg.go.dev/std?tab=packages.

On a number of fronts, I appreciate this.

When I was first assessing whether to get into Go, and as a team lead whether it would be fit for future efforts, some of the questions answered on this site were some of the first I queried to see if the investment was worth it i.e.

Why would I use this? Who is using this? What are they using it for? If I introduce this to my teams as a potential member of our stack, am I introducing something that will be niche and hard for others to pick up and maintain, or will this have multiple applications and thus foster greater adoption?

I obviously could find the answers elsewhere and have since chosen Go for a lot of cases, but a clean one-stop-shop like this for others to look to, or be pointed to, when they first hear of the language is valuable (from my experience, and in my opinion).

Is it just me or it really resembles the rust-lang.org?

Seems just you. I find color scheme and layout quite different.

Did they change their logo recently? Never noticed it before - it's pretty terrible imo; looks like something out of the 80s and doesn't inspire me to use Go at all...

The new logo was launched last year with mixed feedback from the community.

https://blog.golang.org/go-brand

April 26th, 2018 — the new logo was released publicly 566 days ago [1].

People didn’t like it much [2]; it gathered mixed comments in the Gophers Slack group.

[1] https://blog.golang.org/go-brand

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/8f5n19/go-brand/

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