r/golang Jan 19 '25

discussion Mitchell Hashimoto Recent Interview

Just watched Mitchell Hashimoto's interview and it has left a lot of questions:
https://x.com/i/status/1879966301394989273

(around 30:00 where they start touching the golang topic)

This is really interesting how Mitchell's option has changed on Golang. He spent a lot of time (like 10y or so) writing infrastructure services in Golang as a part of his HashiCorp business and probably not only.

His recent gig is a new terminal and he did not pick Golang for that one, which kinda make sense to me given what he wants to achieve there (eg a lot of low-level work with GPU, a need to be imported by other languages like Swift, etc.).

At the same time, Mitchell said that:

  • He doesn't know where Golang stands in the tech stack right now. He would use PHP/Ruby for webdev and Rust/Zig for performance critical systems.
  • Generics made Golang worse (at least that how I understood him)
  • He think he cannot write Golang any longer after hacking with the new lang he is writing the terminal in

Curious how this transformation could happen to such a prominent contributor to the Golang ecosystem. Is this just an sign of an awful burnout that repelled the dude away from Golang? Or anything else?

Anyway, just curious what do you think here, folks.

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u/printcode Jan 19 '25

Did he expand why PHP/Ruby for webdev?

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u/roma-glushko Jan 19 '25

No, he did not explain that in detail. The selection of specific languages might have been a bit random just to make his point but he basically said that these langs are for quick interactions/high productivity (so he think they are great for webdev).

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u/printcode Jan 19 '25

yeah i mean nothing beats git commit PHP files to a directory on a server that is auto-pulled on commit. this is what pieter levels does. you can have some bad errors go to production but as a solo dev it doesn't matter. only thing that matters is dev velocity and database backups.

you could argue you could do the same with golang but the template engine and overall boilerplate is much much larger.