Lets see how far it goes if Google stops giving money to the core team.
2. There are over 300 non-google contributors already
So the Go team says. But Google is still using Java, C++ and Python as it's main languages. And Go wasn't especially planned by Google execs to use for "solving their problems" -- it is a grassroots project by some Google guys to solve those problems. Which is something different than a mandated to use language.
>2. There are over 300 non-google contributors already
The level of contribution matters a lot. If Google staffers do all the core language, runtime, compiler, tooling etc, and the rest just do little stuff here and there in the libs, add documentation, etc, then it's not like this matters much.
How do you know that is the case? I don't know the Google executive plans but it seems like to get Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson together to create a language might have/need some executive level involvement.
Because they have described it themselves (the Go guys). From the language FAQ:
"Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code as its output. By mid-year the language had become a full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a production compiler."
>I don't know the Google executive plans but it seems like to get Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson together to create a language might have/need some executive level involvement.
The agreement to let them work on it by some exec, is different than Google deciding "we need a new language, you guys go build one that fixes our pain points, and we will migrate stuff to that".
V8 or Dart for example are cases of this. Google decided the need to have those created, spend money on marketing and getting top people to work on them, built full-on documentation, marketing material, benchmarks, tools and sites for them, etc. It's the same kind of focus MS had for .NET and SUN had for Java.
Whereas Go is more like how Google had a team work on Unladen Swallow, or Apple had MacRuby, etc, mostly peripheral stuff, like a 20% project that grew up.
"Began as a 20% project" http://talks.golang.org/2012/go1.slide#5
I have no reason to assume that they are lying.
Thats the best way that problems get solved. Go needs to win in the marketplace (even in Google's own internal marketplace) on its own merits. That's the best kind of win.
Corporate mandates end in committees with no sense of design or minimalism. I've seen enough of that to not want any more.
Go may not have begun as an executive mandate, but we now have high level executive support. More than a year ago Go was made Google's 4th "canonical language", which is an mandate that requires infrastructure teams to support the language. Some large teams are migrating to use Go exclusively, and the rate at which Go code is being written at Google is increasing dramatically.
> If Google staffers do all the core language, runtime, compiler, tooling etc, and the rest just do little stuff here and there in the libs, add documentation, etc, then it's not like this matters much.
Except that is not the case. We have many contributors who do core stuff. In fact, some of our hardest problems have been cracked by these guys. I love our community!