But it's fundamentally an open-source project. The only funding from Google comes in the form of paying some of the members' salaries. That's it.
I think the interest in Go has been increasing with or without Google's name tacked on to it, honestly.
Otherwise, you might as well say that the only interest in Rust is because it's funded by Mozilla?
> Otherwise, you might as well say that the only interest in Rust is because it's funded by Mozilla?
Of course some interest in Rust is because it's funded by Mozilla, but the difference is the only there.
Go and Rust differ in that Rust actually builds upon the last few decades of programming language research and takes a good shot at solving some real-world problems. It occupies the same space as C/C++ but solves many issues that plague both languages. You could explain Rust's popularity by association with Mozilla, but you could also explain its popularity by the fact that it's actually a pretty interesting, well-designed language.
Meanwhile Go is neither low-level enough to be useful for performance/memory intensive work nor does it provide reasonable features to compete with higher level languages. It solves some very Google-specific problems (compilation time? If compilation time is an issue for you, it's much more probable that you've done something wrong than that you need a faster-compiling language). And to do that it gives up features which make it inappropriate for almost every project (I don't even want to hear about how you don't need generics--if you're creating empty interfaces you should be using a dynamically typed language and if you're using `go generate` you should go back to 1980 and rediscover why type-unaware code generation is fucking terrible idea). Literally every feature in Go is done better in languages that existed before. Go brings literally no innovation to the table (if you say that Go has a new way to do threading my head will explode). And Go doesn't even include most of the innovations of the last few decades of language design. It's literally decades behind. Given that, I can think of no explanation for its popularity except its association with Google. There's simply nothing it has going for it except hype.
And yet it doesn't matter, because PL research is so broken, that it fails to provide us with even basic understanding on how people write code.