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Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

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Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#311

Post by jeffalyanak »

nurettin wrote: post #72

Like it or not, Google is probably paying around a million $$ a year to keep senior full-time developers around that want to work on the language. That could be used as a benchmark to calculate how much of an investment is required to have a healthy development cycle. If a community-maintained fork is created, it would need time and monetary investment similar to what google is doing just to maintain and develop non-…

I think, to a degree, the growth in popularity in the language — coupled with the perceived value of whichever changes the current Go team won't make — will determine the viability of a fork.

If the popularity of the language grows enough, there will inevitably be new companies and ecosystems reliant on it and those interests may eventually band together to create forks they think bring value to their businesses.

Outside of that formula, forks will almost always remain niche and without significant investment.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#312

Post by Const-me »

apta wrote: post #292
Thaxll wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Java time package has been a disaster for 20 years until Java 8, before that everyone was using Joda. As for generics have a look at what C# does for "proper" generics.

I'm aware of what C# does, that's why I said it was a tradeoff. Compare the number of languages on the JVM to those on the CLR to see why they made this tradeoff. The JVM folks are working on improving generics even further in upcoming releases. I know about Joda time, that even another point in how mature the Java ecosystem is. There's no similar offering in golang.

> Compare the number of languages on the JVM to those on the CLR to see why they made this tradeoff

IMO the main reason why people aren't creating more CLR language is unrelated to generics. You can compile many languages to CLR bytecode and never emit these ldelem/stelem/unbox.any instructions. The main reason is C# is good language, and it evolves fast enough.

I don't believe Java developers deliberately crippled Java to incentivize third parties to develop more JVM languages.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#313

Post by kristianp »

Crinus wrote: post #18

So if it isn't Google's language, does it mean i can go and make my own compiler for it, call it -say- "Crinus Go" (to differentiate it from Google's Go but still point out that it is an implementation of Go) and not worry about Google coming after me?

Yes, please do so, and implement some Generics too!

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#314

Post by grumpydba »

apta wrote: post #294
grumpydba wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory usage, compile time, simplicity, readability and deployment story are notable fronts in which go is several miles ahead.

Java will use however much memory is assigned to it, since it defaults to throughput performance (though now with G1 and Shenandoah that can also be tuned)[1]. Compilation times are not that different, especially when using incremental compilation. I worked on large projects in both languages, and for any non-trivial code base, the difference isn't that far off. I'd argue that readability is better in Java due to thi…

You mention a lot of workarounds and knobs though. And the excessive use of layers of abstractions in the Java world is scary.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#316

Post by coldtea »

xeromal wrote: post #161
coldtea wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that and because of the tight control and the opinionated, "our way or the highway", core team.

I'm sure they would've been "My way or the highway" if they hadn't been part of Google too.

And I'm sure being paid to work on Go and being part of Google gives them much more power over the community, and much more personal power to insist on their way.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#317

Post by coldtea »

jsty wrote: post #27
coldtea wrote: post #14

> The blog post starts by quoting @kapoorsunny asking why there can't be something like OpenGo, with a community implementation of generics. I hope that it is clear that the answer is that there could be. Nothing prevents that from happening. In particular, Google doesn't prevent that from happening. No, but like with the community developed dependency solution, Google can arbitrarily chose not to include it in Go, e…

But this is the same with any open source project - you can write as much code as you want, but if those with the commit bits decide they don't like it, it's not getting upstreamed. If you were really keen to push some functionality into the Linux kernel, but Linus decided he didn't like it, you'd be in exactly the same position. The fact that in Go's case quite a lot of the maintainers work at Google doesn't really…

>But this is the same with any open source project - you can write as much code as you want, but if those with the commit bits decide they don't like it, it's not getting upstreamed.

Yes, but seldom those with the commit bits will so blatantly disregard the community as with the case of the community developed dependency solution (and other cases).

Especially in projects where those with the commit bits are voted, there would be riots...

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#318

Post by coldtea »

fredsir wrote: post #87
jsty wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is the same with any open source project - you can write as much code as you want, but if those with the commit bits decide they don't like it, it's not getting upstreamed. If you were really keen to push some functionality into the Linux kernel, but Linus decided he didn't like it, you'd be in exactly the same position. The fact that in Go's case quite a lot of the maintainers work at Google doesn't really…

> The fact that in Go's case quite a lot of the maintainers work at Google doesn't really change much. It does if those calling the shots aren’t the committers but their bosses. I’m not saying that’s how it is, but if it is, it changes things a great deal.

It also does since those calling the shots are not just some community members among others that just happened to start the project, but people with job security working on the language, with the money of the biggest sponsor of the language behind them, hosting the infrastructure, doing conferences, and so on.

So it's not a level playing field with another contributor.

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#319

Post by coldtea »

geodel wrote: post #242
coldtea wrote: post #14

> The blog post starts by quoting @kapoorsunny asking why there can't be something like OpenGo, with a community implementation of generics. I hope that it is clear that the answer is that there could be. Nothing prevents that from happening. In particular, Google doesn't prevent that from happening. No, but like with the community developed dependency solution, Google can arbitrarily chose not to include it in Go, e…

> No, but like with the community developed dependency solution, Unless you are deliberately trying to obscure the facts. Sam Boyer et al are no unanimously elected community leaders whose solutions somehow must be included with main distribution. > So it's more like saying "you can have your own niche ports, just don't expect them to become part of the main language". This is exactly same for all open source languag…

>Unless you are deliberately trying to obscure the facts. Sam Boyer et al are no unanimously elected community leaders whose solutions somehow must be included with main distribution.

Unless you are deliberately trying to obscure the facts, this is irrelevant.

Their project seemingly had the blessing of the core team, it was touted as a community effort, it was adopted and tested by the community at large, it was presented and critiqued in public discussions, and so on.

And then it was shot down, unilaterally, and replaced with no discussion by a never before seen implementation from a core team member.

>This is exactly same for all open source languages, if core maintainers do not like the your change either fork it and implement or use any other language which gives you feature you wanted.

Not really, many open source projects give the community a chance to vote on such things, have core team members that are voted into place, and go out of their way to adopt popular community extensions (as opposed to implement their own core-team only versions).

Re: Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

#320

Post by harimau777 »

geodel wrote: post #229
nurettin wrote: post #72

Like it or not, Google is probably paying around a million $$ a year to keep senior full-time developers around that want to work on the language. That could be used as a benchmark to calculate how much of an investment is required to have a healthy development cycle. If a community-maintained fork is created, it would need time and monetary investment similar to what google is doing just to maintain and develop non-…

I read somewhere on mailing list that there are about ~30 people inside Google working full time on Go. And that is different from engineers working on products built using Go. With infrastructure cost added it would be easily $10 million a year. So these Linkedin/Twitter style thought leaders demanding some kinda OpenGo foundation need to ask if they have capacity to raise this amount consistently over years to star…

Would it be viable to setup some sort of trust at the beginning so that it wasn't necessary to raise that money repeatedly?
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