The value it’s brought to Google has definitely not been worth the cost. It did not really replace other languages. If you join Google now as a new engineer, you will likely be writing C++, Java, or maybe a web language
You just happen to be in the subset / cluster / areas that write in golang. Probabilistically speaking across the entire Google engineering population both you and the teams around you are outliers. That doesn’t mean golang is insignificant.
As to whether golang was worth it I disagree with the parent, I think it was probably worth the resources invested, even if e.g. usage has leveled off internally, but at any rate this is a hard thing to measure so we’re all just opining.
Was Go inspired / derived from the use of sawzall and it just performs its intended uses in other parts of the company?
Sawzall was not a widely-liked language, so people had already been trying to replace it with Python, but Go had better performance and stronger typing so it was a better fit. Go really found its footing as a better Python (for some use cases) rather than a better C++.
I still wonder how many potential competitors the mapreduce and bigtable papers eliminated. perhaps it doesn't matter since the people that blindly adopted such things without enough thought might have got mired in some other nonsense anyway.
And actually I think even 10K is a very generous upper bound, really if I were betting money I’d peg it at like maybe 2000 engineers that use golang as their primary language and a big chunk of those are SWE-SRE?
There's just _way_ more Java and C++ than there is golang…
Go is very popular in some niches (a semi-mandate in SRE produced a bunch of it) and not used at all elsewhere.