[pebers]

It isn't necessarily a bad idea to start with a minimal design and add features later once the implementation is more mature. Even if Go never gets generics, it's still a good solution for a number of problem domains (for example, it seems to have found something of a niche for infrastructure; Kubernetes, Prometheus, juju, etc.)

[jacques_chester]

Kubernetes has enormous masses of repetitive code that is essentially a workaround for the absence of generics or other kinds of improved types. The reliance on "union types" -- really, exclusive arcs -- gives me the heebies and also guarantees that there is a bottleneck for new features: PRs to core. And then there's the whole TypeMeta thing. An entire dynamic type system because Golang can't express what Kubernetes needs.

And no, I don't see code generation as a good thing. It's fragile and difficult to safely upgrade.

[uluyol]

Kubernetes has more or less invented their own type system. I agree that much of it is horrible to deal with, but I don't know how you could easily express it in any language.

Of course someone could always prove me wrong by doing just that.

[pebers]

That's kind of my point; the code might not be as beautiful as we could ever imagine, but as a product it works extremely well, and would be worse if it carried around a lot of runtime baggage and poor performance which many of the alternatives would have given.

[jacques_chester]

This is not about beauty. It is about reliability, simplicity and safety, all of which contribute to development velocity.

Golang is simple only for toy examples.

At scale Golang codebases are difficult to navigate, understand and test due to the repetitive repetition of repetitious repeats.

And the idea that at-the-time-viable alternative languages like Java, C++ or D are too slow for something as relatively lightly trafficked as the core Kubernetes controller codebase is just plain silly.

[pebers]

When I mentioned speed, I obviously wasn't ruling out C++ on that basis - but I would rule out Python or Node. Java is fast enough when going but the awkwardness of needing a JVM plus abysmal runtime memory usage make it pretty unattractive to me, especially for the k8s agents where the resource needs have to be subtracted from total node size.

I've not found Go difficult to navigate because of repetition. Quite the reverse really - it's easy to reason about where everything comes from and (usually) easy to work out how everything connects together. I would take that any day over a large Java codebase with the usual obfuscations of dependency injection, or a Python or C++ codebase where somebody has tried to be "clever".

[jacques_chester]

You are focused on good Golang vs bad Java.

People have also written bad Golang and good Java.

The difference for me is: given the choice between good Java and good Golang, I'd take Java. I don't have acres of stuff in my damn way.