[010a]

I would emphasize that, in many of those examples, Go wasn't a very viable choice when the apps were originally written. Twitch chose Go back at ~1.2 (2013), when Erlang might have made more sense.

Today, for companies making a similar decision now, that argument is a bit different. Go 1.6/1.7 obviously has massive improvements in the areas the article outlines. But, in Erlang camp, we have Elixir making that more enticing.

I would argue Twitch made the right choice. They will have a magnitude easier time finding devs to support a Go system over an Erlang system. And their product never suffered for it. And they are clearly a force behind making Go better, which has helped more people than just them.

[ken47]

This propagates a myth that the choice of language is the bottleneck in a complex program. Twitch hires engineers who are good enough not to be constrained by the difficulties of learning a particular language.

Odds are, Twitch wasn't trying to optimize over a long time horizon when they chose Go. They were once a scrappy startup, surely accumulating technical debt left and right to get product features out. Go was likely a locally optimal choice.

Twitch chat also requires heavy string processing, and that's an arena where, if I had to guess, Go has an edge over Erlang.

[chipperyman573]

It's not really heavy string processing, it's all just replacing inner strings (not even Regex).

[ken47]

Sure. I think we're talking about different things when we say heavy. Perhaps less ambiguous phrasing would have been "frequent string manipulation."