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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

It's cool but what I really want, what I'd trade almost anything for, is an all-in-one smtp+dkim+imap mailserver binary written in a non-meme language.

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I have been running my own mail server since the 1980s, using Debian/exim4 for the last eight years. With the weird patches for greylisting, etc., I never wanted to update it. In the last week, I jumped to docker-mailserver[0]. O.M.G. That is too easy! Yes, there is picking one's way through the options at first, but those go in a tiny config file and survive updates. The heavy lifting is all in one container. I just use it as a mail gateway, into a local machine that has port 25 filtered, but I played a bit with the imap functions, too. You do have to have a box somewhere that can run containers, which for me is a KVM VPS.

Gmail instantly was happy with my inbound emails. I got on a backscatter blacklist because I didn't immediately drop invalid email addresses at the gateway, but that will time out shortly. And just as I had settled in with the new server, I got to test the update function. This week the entire docker-mailserver project moved to a new repo name on Github, with a new release. A couple of the config files changed names, but nothing much in contents. A docker pull for the new image name, and my mail server was running the fresh release. Happy, happy, happy.

[0] https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

Like Maddy? https://foxcpp.dev/maddy/

Yes. Exactly like Maddy except not in Go.

So non meme language and not Go?

What languages are acceptable then? You may need to provide a definition to prevent confusion.

I mean languages that have been in existence for more than a decade and aren't controlled by a single corporation.

Go has existed for 11 years. It's probably safe to say that it won't die off soon. As for the control part: What could Google do to Go that would affect you as a user of some software written in it?

Deprecate it.

If a programming language has exited for 11 years I'd be more worried about the author of the software dropping that than the author of the language deprecating the language. It's the Lindy effect.

Why would a market care about the language a product's written at? Maybe only programmers, and anal retentive ones at that.

I wouldn't want to depend on some open source project in an obscure language because it will likely get fewer contributors. But go isn't some obscure language.

Go isn't a meme language.

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