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Facebook Go

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36 pointsdetrol2k8 comments

See also previous discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8601456

I'm surprised Facebook doesn't use more Go. Everyone I talk to from Facebook seems to love Go--no idea why they don't use it more widely. Facebook doesn't strike me as the sort of company to not use a programming language just because its rival (Google) is in the driver's seat. Go is still open source.

I know Facebook has some D advocates, but D doesn't seem to be too popular among the programmers I know. I haven't looked too deeply at it myself, but it seems to be a language more interested in taking the job of Rust and C, rather than the job of Python and Ruby. So there is no reason Facebook can't pursue both languages as a company.

Funny that the original intent for the Go creators was to not have to write C++[1] -- which of course is in the C/C++/Rust/D space -- and that Rob Pike seemed surprised that more C++ programmers didn't make the switch.

The two languages seem to diverge when it comes to the fact that Walter Bright seems to like to write both expressive and high-performance code (meaning, at the same time). That kind of philosophy tends to lead to iterators, generators[2] etc. which Go seems to look at as superfluous -- just write a for loop, more or less.

[1] Write C++ for the particular software that they make, anyway.

[2] Or whatever the equivalent is in D.

Maybe Facebook engineers like generics? Regardless, I think Facebook is capable enough to create it's own language as well.

Creating a new language is a big effort that requires a lot of expertise. Why would they create a new language if there's one that they already like and want to use?

There should be description fields or some kind of readme files for the profiles on GitHub. I can only assume that what I'm looking at is a set of tools written in/for Go language that are used by Facebook. Right?

While browsing through the repos I noticed they are all by this guy:

https://github.com/daaku

Well done daaku :)

Came here to say this. Respect to daaku!

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