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by throwawaysml 3146 days ago
Am I alone in finding it unsurprising but unfortunate that all those addons to the official go toolchain are created by everyone to paper over the limitations of the Google Go implementation (which naturally reflects Google's development process and needs more than anything)?

EDIT: E.g moving .git/ back and forth or adding extra vetting/linting tools instead of extending `go vet`.
2 comments
iends 3146 days ago
The most painful parts of the Go ecosystem are directly tied to the fact that the Google is making Go for themselves first and foremost and the community is an afterthought.
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throwawaysml 3146 days ago
True and the more surprising aspect is that to land a develop position at Google you need to be on top of all CS theory and fresh in memory, just to unlearn everything and use Go for unspectacular business/enterprise projects, unless you're on certain teams like V8 or DeepMind for example. I think Go is meant to replace Google's Java coders with Go coders and have a language that fits exactly into the mold of their coding guides and rules for their monorepo and all the business/enterprise code written by the hordes of the rest of their developers.

Google's also opensourced Abseil, their C++ standard library (not meant to completely replact STL, to be clear), which contains all kinds of classes which were copied into many existing Google C++ projects in some form or fashion and sometimes incompatibly (e.g. Google's StringPiece found in several projects).

Either way I applaud them for doing a lot to open source projects. It's not something we can take for granted.

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throwawaysml 3146 days ago
I suspected this might get downvoted and wanted to make clear I'm not demeaning the 90% of Google developers, but I failed, so I deserved the downvote. Just to make it clear I'm aware of where my comment failed to express what I was trying to communicate. Will try to be less lazy next time. It's hard to explain the purpose Google built Go for without considering where it's not used, and I failed to write a good comment.
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farslan 3146 days ago
Author here. Sure, there a reflections of their vision in Go. However all these deficiencies are now merged with the vision of current stakeholders, aka community. Go has learned and changed a lot in the past years ( in a good way). Going forward everyone will benefit from it, including us.
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