published: [nandalism home] (dark light)
Golang – my favorite programming language
I love golang and the team behind it. Rob Pike once said “golang is an open source project, not a google project.”. I still trust Rob Pike and am
sure he meant what he said. However, I do not trust google, and don’t want their spyware running on my machine.
I refuse to install android-studio since I am sure it will be phoning home about all sorts of things. However, I naively believed
that command line tools like compilers are safe from such network backdoors. This comes from using tools like vi, awk, Perl, python and GCC. One would never
imagine they were sending information across the network.
Unfortunately this is no longer true as compilers and editors now have integrated package managers. We expect them to communicate on the network
and we don’t really know everything they might be communicating.
Obviously I’m not singling out google here. The same goes for swift (apple) and C# (microsoft). I don’t want to work in those languages since I don’t want to install
the ecosystem that comes with them, on my machine.
Something I read recently and my own experiences with the golang package proxy reminded my how much I trust the golang tools on my machine, and yet how
little I should trust them.
Remember when command line tools were safe from this behavior? Admittedly C also came from a corporation but it came free with every unix install
and soon after I started using it, Richard Stallman et al. gave us GCC, a free C compiler.
GCC, in turn, allowed the development of new languages like Perl and python. No corporations in sight! We got a lot done with these languages.
It’s not like we are incapable of creating ecosystems without corporate “help”. We have proved that, with countless projects in the past.
Using java for free software was the first misstep. We were warned against it but ignored those warnings. Much later the oracle/google battle showed
how precarious it is to build on languages controlled by corporations.
Let’s not keep making this mistake. Are there still free languages out there? Well, yes there are quite a few (and surely many more I forget to mention).
I’m focusing on compiled/statically-typed languages here so will be skipping over Common Lisp (a venerable language we should all seriously consider).
A brief review reminded me of Zig and Nim. I had some problems building Zig from source, so moved on to Nim (which I also failed to build f
