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Go is Google's language, not ours

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Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#31

Post by ncmncm »

adrianN wrote: post #9
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

To determine how open a language really is look at how many widely used implementations of the compiler there are for the language. If there is only a single implementation of the compiler/interpreter than it is not really open but controlled by that core compiler team.

Most languages I can think of have one very dominant implementation and maybe another one or two that few people use. Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Go, Rust, Haskell... C/C++ are the only exception since Clang became serious competition to GCC and Visual Studio. Even Javascript only really has Chrome and Firefox.

So, there's your answer right there.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#32

Post by cryptos »

warent wrote: post #14

"... can't we have something like OpenGo ..." > " ... this won't happen ... " I'm confused as to what's stopping someone from forking it, calling it OpenGo, and building a community around that.

This could be done, of course. But how likely is such an approach to succeed? It would effectively create a new language and in turn to a new ecosystem. Why not just use a different language (Rust comes to mind) then?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#34

Post by Kovah »

I am about to learn a new programming language and I decided against Go just because of this fact. I do not trust Google and reading this article just makes clear how critical the state of the language is in terms of control by the community.

Python looks most promising and I already worked with it, but I am not sure yet. Can anyone recommend a viable alternative for Go? Any web-focused language that is performant, modern andalready well used?

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#35

Post by ipsum2 »

cryptos wrote: post #24

Actually there are relatively few real (TM) open source projects driven by the community, at least if you look at important projects. Many open source projects are just commercial projects driven mainly by a single company. Look for example at Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. They follow exactly the model described in the article. Technologies like these could have been developed by a community, too, but it…

I'm curious what the distinction is between Rust (driven by Mozilla) and Go (driven by Google).

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#36

Post by dis-sys »

majewsky wrote: post #29
dis-sys wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The license can change any time they want. They can change the license to prevent certain companies from using future releases and/or security patches. Let's don't forget the fact that Huawei had legally binding contracts with all those US suppliers.

So? Just fork the last freely-licensed Version then.

then start to use clean room process to reimplement all future bug fixes? nice!

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#37

Post by theshrike79 »

pa7ch wrote: post #17

Many like Go because it is an opinionated language. I'm not sure that a 'community' run language will create something like that because there are too many opinions. Many claim to represent the community, but not the community that doesn't share their opinion. Without clear leaders I fear technical direction and taste will be about politics which seems more uncertain/risky. I like that there is a tight cohesive group…

In my opinion the way they are handling adding Generics to Go is proof of this model working.

They are actually trying to pick the implementation that solves real world issues, not just trying to tick [x] Generics in the Go spec sheet.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#38

Post by kmlx »

Kovah wrote: post #34

I am about to learn a new programming language and I decided against Go just because of this fact. I do not trust Google and reading this article just makes clear how critical the state of the language is in terms of control by the community. Python looks most promising and I already worked with it, but I am not sure yet. Can anyone recommend a viable alternative for Go? Any web-focused language that is performant, m…

you shouldn’t let an article decide what language you learn.

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#39

Post by networkimprov »

To their credit, the Go team withdrew most of Error Values draft 2 [1] after a great deal of negative feedback. However, they've kept one unpopular change to fmt.Errorf().

We can hope that draft 2 of Error Handling [2] won't look anything like draft 1, for reasons such as [3].

[1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/29934

[2] https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Go2ErrorHandlingFeedback

[3] https://medium.com/@mnmnotmail/golang-how-dare-you-handle-my...

Re: Go is Google's language, not ours

#40

Post by anoncake »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #15
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely true. There's virtually no room for improving the underlying compiler toolchain because there's no allowance or support for an alternate implementation (using GCC, for example). Go at least has gcc-go, which is a compliant implementation that gets some benefits from being part of GCC (like not completely broken support for dynamic link libraries!). Having a second compiler implementation forces the l…

How is there no allowance? A lot of people in the community would love a rust compiler that can compile down to C for instance.

Maybe the tool chain is hardcoded to use the standard compiler? But that's more likely because of YAGNI, not because the rust community hates freedom.
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