[scottlamb]

> Did he? I was under the impression he wasn't approved to write C at Google when Go was initially being developed.

It's not that strict.

Google has a big source repository which holds essentially all applications which run on Google's production machines. (They share a lot of library code.) In this repository, code written in any of several languages must have been written or approved by someone who has "readability" in that language. There's no C readability, but C++ readability applies to files ending in .cc or .h. (Not sure about .c.) There's no shortage of people around with C++ readability, so Ken wouldn't have had a hard time getting anything approved. He also could have easily gotten readability if he wanted it.

This process wouldn't necessarily apply at all to separate git/Mercurial repositories used by open source things like Go.