Ask HN: Is the Golang ecosystem health declining? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the Golang ecosystem health declining?

11 pointsznpy6 comments

Hello there!

I recently moved back into a devops/sre position and I'm again working with kubernetes and many golang-based tools.

I've been away (working with different technologies) for a "few years".

It's been a couple of months now and I'm stumbling in Go-based code repositories from github that either won't compile or are unofficially abandoned (last commit from 5 years ago, the README.md does not explicitly mention them being abandoned).

Hence the question: is the golang ecosystem health declining? A few years ago most repository would compile via mostly "go get && go build"

Am I perceiving this the wrong way?

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A few years ago Go was still more of a novelty in uptake, and various new entusiasts started new projects in it. Most projects get abandoned over time, whether Go, Rust, Python, or whatever.

Those projects were never mature or important to have companies/maintaining communities/etc built around them, and evidently never had a determined dev behind them who'd stick with them anyway.

What repositories where they? How many stars? Did anybody consider them important and mature?

Most of the Go ecosystem is like an iceberg - 80% of it is under the radar in infrastructure and enterprise repos.

It's the go to language for the plumbing of the Internet. The default enterprise stack on the backend these days is Kubernetes, Docker and Go, It used to be VMs and Java which still has a lot of legacy deploys, and will have for a long time.

One of the things you may be noticing is that there is not much more churn in the Go ecosystem. It's very mature, so nobody's updating code which is feature complete and working or has been subsumed by the awsome standard library.

Hope not - we just rewrote our entire stack w Go . We're massive fans of it.

I think a lot of people just got burned out on "if err != nil"

Besides the error handling, I also got to the bottom of trying to do high performance stuff in Go and came to the conclusion that you have to use non-idiomatic Go to go faster.

I think they held off too long on adding generics. I for one lost interest and moved on to other things before it landed and haven't looked back.

I know a popular golang repo, link below ;) https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes

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