[lallysingh]

No they won't. DoD is small compared to the rest of the software market. You get better quality and lower cost with COTS than with custom solutions, unless you spend a crap ton. The labor market for software's no different.

Everyone likes to crap on C++ because it's (a) popular and (b) tries to make everyone happy with a ton of different paradigms built-in. But you can program nearly any system with it more scalably than anything else.

[adrianN]

In my experience people criticize C++ for its safety problems. Safety is more important in certain areas than in others. I’m not convinced that you get better quality with C++ than with Ada

[nmz]

Go was built because C++ does not scale. Anybody that's ever used a source based distro knows that if you're installing/building a large C++ codebase, better forget your PC for the day because you will not be using it. Rust also applies here, but at least multiplatform support is easier, so I don't fault it for slow build times

[pjmlp]

Go was created because Rob Pike hates C++, notice Plan 9 and Inferno don't have C++ compilers, even though C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs.

As for compilation times, yes that is an issue, they could have switched to Java as other Google departments were doing, with some JNI if needed.

As sidenote, Kubernetes was started in Java and only switching to Go after some Go folks joined the team and advocated for the rewrite, see related FOSDEM talk.

[nmz]

A lot of people hate C++, that doesn't grant you the ability to make a language, however very few have the opportunity to create a new language out of free time provided by said language taking too long to compile.

I do not know why they did not go with java, I imagine building a java competitor (limbo) and then being forced to use it is kind of demeaning. but again, this would all be conjecture.

[lallysingh]

Go was made because Rob Pike didn't want to do Java.

[nmz]

There were 3 people making the language, it wasn't a one man thing.

[bmitc]

> more scalably than anything else

That's quite debatable. C++ is well known to scale poorly.

[lallysingh]

Yet the largest codebases I know of are either C, Fortran, or C++. Who's doing anything really big (in terms of LOC) in another language?

[bmitc]

C/C++ basically demand that codebases be large. And we hear all the time about software troubles written in these languages. Finding reports of this are almost endless.

I think people who write complex applications in more sane languages end up not having to write millions of lines of code that no one actually understands. The sane languages are more concise and don't require massive hurdles to try and bake in saftey into the codebase. Safety is baked into the language itself.