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by behnamoh 3596 days ago
I'm not a Golang programmer, but the mere fact that GOOG decided Java for android is convincing enough that even GOOG does not believe in its Go.

(Frankly, I doubted that a little, until I realized Al-*-Go was not actually written in Go!)
2 comments
seabrookmx 3596 days ago
Android predates Go. And it wasn't even started by Google.. Android was it's own company and had already made it's decision on Java well before Google decided to buy it.

Not to mention Go is focused on a different use case. Go is gunning for microservices (with it's concurrency chops) and CLI based tools (being a single compiled binary).. whereas Android apps are a totally different beast that stands little to gain from either of those. In fact shipping multiple binaries for different architectures is a bit of a detractor for Android considering it supports MIPS, ARM, and x86.

> until I realized Al-*-Go was not actually written in Go!

Again, AlphaGo was based off technology from DeepMind, a company Google acquired.

Please atleast do some quick wikipedia browsing before spewing FUD.

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oautholaf 3596 days ago
As someone who was there, let me say that the decision to use Java was definitely not made before the Google acquisition. The codebase that came with the acquisition was C++/JavaScript and was completely rewritten.
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behnamoh 3595 days ago
> Android predates Go...

So? Apple introduced Swift after Obj-C to make developing iOS apps easier. What about GOOG? Couldn't they at least use Dart or Go (both of which they developed) for android app development after Java? BTW, last time I checked, they're still in for a lot to come from Oracle.

> Again, Al-*-Go was based off technology from ...

So let me get this straight. They bought a technology which was apparently written in C++/JS and rewrote it in another lang, but then again, they did not choose Go or Dart.

Seems like some one needs a wikipedia browsing...

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oautholaf 3596 days ago
Uhh, as someone who was there when Android began: There was no Go in 2005. And anyway, Go started with explicit about initial goal of being a server-side language, with choices (eg, only static linking) appropriate for that goal.
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