Ask HN: Future of Go? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Future of Go?

11 pointshumility9 comments

In my opinion, everything google touches turns into mud (viz. sparrow, angular etc) - even though it is quite lucrative at this point, is it worth investing time learning & considering Go for serious backend development? Pardon me for my naiveté.

Honorary mention: didgoogleshutdown.com

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I don't think it's going to go anywhere (heh) but I do think it will find its niche - you can see this in things like Docker and Kubernetes.

It serves a useful function, being somewhere between a pleasant, slow and somewhat less dependable scripting language like Ruby or Python, and a fast, dangerous language like C. It's perfect for writing lower-lever distributed systems, and is terrifically boring in a way that a reliable language designed to handle these sorts of systems should be.

So I don't think it's going anywhere. It's great for writing the plumbing that powers everything. I don't want to build web apps with it, but there are plenty of other options for that.

Mayhaps it's not ideal for backend development, right?

Go is quickly becoming _the_ defacto language for writing cloud management and tooling. Look no further than both docker[1] and kubernetes[2] for a very wide community. Kubernetes in specific has a very diverse community with people from dozens of companies rallying behind Google with some serious developer manpower behind it.

Then there are companies like cloudflare[3] which while you might not have heard of them, run much of the underlying infrastructure that a large swath of the internet depends upon. Companies like hashicorp[4], makers of consul and packer. etc, etc. Go is opinionated, love it or hate it, it is here to stay. It fills a really nice gap between python and C and is a slam dunk for building distributed services, which is what it was designed for.

[1] http://www.docker.com/

[2] http://kubernetes.io/

[3] https://blog.cloudflare.com/go-at-cloudflare/

[4] https://hashicorp.com/

Google can't shut down Golang. It's a public open source project. It's likely Google isn't even its biggest user anymore.

Works pretty great, has a strong community, many contributors outside of Google. I highly doubt it's going anywhere (much to some peoples' dismay I suppose).

Go seems solid - I'm not a go person - the kind of stuff I make generally doesn't need it - but even outside traditional C communities Go is super popular. I know modulus use it for their load balancer (rather than node, which is interesting) and the CoreOS and GoSquared folks I've spoken to think it's pretty rad too.

The future is now. Learn Go, learn how to handle an another way of programming. Earn the benefits and either it's the right tool otherwise you go further. It's really depends on your needs. When I should something to say about my experience with Go then that Go has a nice minimalistic type-system, you will appreciate that.

Point made, it's open source and even without Google, we still have communities. For these who are interested, you can Google Ruby history.

I am also interested in this. I'm reading a lot about it, and goroutines look fantastic.

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