71–80 of 396 posts
IMHO Go has been one of the best-managed open source projects ever. Hats off to Google for supporting it.
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What are some things that make it well managed?
Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
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> The notion that only Google could shepherd a programming language is hilarious. I never said anything of the sort. I said that "let the community vote on who new leaders are" doesn't work. Python, PostgreSQL, and Rust don't work like that either; it's just members of a fairly small "core team" that can vote, or some variant thereof. I have no inside knowledge here, but I'll stake a good amount of money that the Go…
I think Googles good will in recent years is the problem. I think Rust is better divorced from Mozilla, and Go would be better if it was divorced a bit from Google for a lot of the same reasons.
I don't really follow what you mean with that.
People keep going on that Big Tech needs to invest more in open source projects and maintainership. "But no, not like that!" Hmkay...
In the end, the people doing the work get to decide. That's how it works everywhere. Go originated at Google and many (though far from all) of the core people working on it are still paid by Google. The people doing the work seem to have no problem with this relationship, so standing on the sidelines shouting "no no, do the work differently!" is not really brilliant IMO.
And as I said, I don't see Google "controlling" anything. What does that even mean? Larry Page deciding what happens in the next Go release or something?
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Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
Absolutely inaccurate. Pointer de-reference operator had a breaking change after 1.x
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are some things that make it well managed?
Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are some things that make it well managed?
Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
The backwards compatibility promise:
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I don't think this is true. Python had a BDFL and it didn't seem to benefit much from it. I'm not sure what other projects this attitude draws from. Off-hand I'd guess it causes less drama but no appreciable increase of quality, just like other forms of bureaucracy. Meanwhile there's entire landfills of failed projects with single owners who couldn't bend enough. We just don't find this worth discussing. Of course th…
Linux/Linus Torvalds stands out as another notable BDFL.
RSC has a really good blog: https://research.swtch.com/
Golang is easily one of my favorite new languages. It's fast and clean without the difficulty of Rust. I was able to create a small mobile app with Chat GPT without any real experience in Golang.
I would like better mobile and gaming frameworks though. Although I really like Flutter, I think Google missed a major opportunity to use Golang instead of Dart.
What's next? Any good for native Chrome support?