I’ve left Google after working there for 19 years.
For most of that time I’ve been fortunate in being able to work on the Go programming language. Go was started by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and Robert Griesemer in the fall of 2007. I joined the team in June, 2008, about the same time as Russ Cox. I’ve been very lucky to be able to work with such remarkable people on such an interesting project.
I am astonished at how much use Go has gotten over the years. Go has reached the status of being just another programming language, one that any programmer can choose when appropriate. That is far beyond what any of us expected in the early days, when our best hope was that Go might serve as an example for useful ideas that other languages and programming environments could adopt.
I started on Go by adding a Go frontend to the GC
11 Comments
90s_dev
> That is far beyond what any of us expected in the early days, when our best hope was that Go might serve as an example for useful ideas that other languages and programming environments could adopt.
Am I understanding you correctly? The Go authors basically expected Go to be just a good starting point or source of ideas for real languages to stand on?
cratermoon
Hugged to death, so https://archive.is/RbkzW
chubot
I wonder what people use GCC Go for, in production? I tried it and it seems pretty cool, although the binaries start slower for some reason (I think it was more than a second even?)
r0nan
I’m curious what he means by Google changing and the Go project changing
RainyDayTmrw
> But Gooogle [sic] has changed, and Go has changed, and the overall computer programming environment has changed. It’s become clear over the last year or so that I am no longer a good fit for the Go project at Google. I have to move on.
That's kinda surprising to hear. I wonder what happened. It would have been easy to leave out these 3 sentences or replace them with fluff. The author choosing to write this out suggests that there is some weight here.
neves
What are the good use cases for Go today? It looks like the hype has gone.
philosophty
[dead]
benesch
It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community, and the programming community at large. In addition to gccgo, Ian wrote the gold linker, has blogged prolifically about compiler toolchains, and maintains huge swaths of the gcc codebase [0]. And probably much, much more that I’m not aware of.
I’ve had the pleasure of trading emails with Ian several times over the years. He’s been a real inspiration to me. Amidst whatever his responsibilities and priorities were at Google he always found time to respond to my emails and review my patches, and always with insightful feedback.
I have complicated feelings about the language that is Go, but I feel confident in saying the language will be worse off without Ian involved. The original Go team had strong Bell Labs vibes—a few folks who understood computers inside and out who did it all: as assembler, linker, two compilers, a language spec, a documentation generator, a build system, and a vast standard library. It has blander, corporate vibes now, as the language has become increasingly important to Google, and standard practices for scaling software projects have kicked in. Such is the natural course of things, I suppose. I suspect this cultural shift is what Ian alluded to in his message, though I am curious about the specific tipping point that led to his decision to leave.
Ian, I hope you take a well-deserved break, and I look forward to following whatever projects you pursue next.
[0]: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
cletus
Google has over the years tried to get several new languages off the ground. Go is by far the most successful.
What I find fascinating is that all of them that come to mind were conceived by people who didn't really understand the space they were operating in and/or had no clear idea of what problem the language solved.
There was Dart, which was originally intended to be shipped as a VM in Chrome until the Chrome team said no.
But Go was originally designed as a systems programming language. There's a lot of historical revisionism around this now but I guarantee you it was. And what's surprising about that is that having GC makes that an immediate non-starter. Yet it happened anyway.
The other big surprise for me was that Go launched without external dependencies as a first-class citizen of the Go ecosystem. For the longest time there were two methods of declaring them: either with URLs (usually Github) in the import statements or with badly supported manifests. Like just copy what Maven did for Java. Not the bloated XML of course.
But Go has done many things right like having a fairly simple (and thus fast to compile) syntax, shipping with gofmt from the start and favoring error return types over exceptions, even though it's kind of verbose (and Rust's matching is IMHO superior).
Channels were a nice idea but I've become convinced that cooperative async-await is a superior programming model.
Anyway, Go never became the C replacement the team set out to make. If anything, it's a better Python in many ways.
Good luck to Ian in whatever comes next. I certainly understand the issues he faced, which is essentially managing political infighting and fiefdoms.
Disclaimer: Xoogler.
nikolayasdf123
so what is the reason why he is leaving? layoffs? burnout? up-or-out without up? internal politics pushed him out? seems like he wants to work. so what happened?
philosopher1234
This is so sad! It seems Go is fast becoming rudderless, i worry the wualities that have made it great wont survive the tides at google this way. But i hope to be wrong.