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Comment by onionisafruit | Hacker News Reader

I dabbled in Kubernetes at work a few years ago. I was shocked at the state of their go.mod files. Especially because I had heard Kubernetes used as an example of great Go software. Right off the bat I needed to copy a dozen or so `replace` statements into my go.mod. I was sure I just didn’t understand something and spent an hour or so looking for the “right way” only to discover other open source controllers that had the same replaces in their go.mods.

Maybe that was a transitory stage and it’s straightened out now. I certainly hope so.

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I think a lot of people assume Kubernetes must be a good Go example, because it's so big and successful. But it started life as a Java project and was ported into Go, and that shows in some of the architecture, Also, in general across all languages, picking the absolute largest projects you can is often not a great idea in terms of copying design unless you too are going to be that large, e.g., I wouldn't suggest using Firefox as an example of C++ necessarily. Such projects always end up developing solutions to problems you will never have, and solving problems we don't have is one of the most common mistakes software developers make.

I like your comparison about Firefox not being a great example of "good" C/C++.

I'd personally consider myself comfortable in C/C++. I've built Wayland compositors, H264 backends for live-streaming, and built Chromium occasionally for testing. Despite being a die-hard Firefox (zen) user - I still have not been able to compile Firefox! To be fair, this was pre-Firefox quantum days so I hope their SVM and build tools have improved.

I remember early on the Go people complaining about the K8S Go code

Definitely do not look at Kubernetes as a good example of go code and especially not how it handles deps (btw, it only relatively recently switched to go mods).

Not to say it is a bad project. Not at all.

They write it in space shuttle mode. Which means that it’s all got too many components from too many makers all kludged together and then one piece falls off and the whole thing blows up in production.

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