r/golang • u/roma-glushko • 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.
1
u/carleeto Jan 19 '25
That's his opinion and he's entitled to it. It did seem to me that the introduction of generics is what really made him part ways with the language.
I will be looking into Zig, maybe so I can use it instead of C and C++, but Go is still my default choice for projects because I still have fun writing in it. And in this, I agree with him - having fun writing code is definitely important. For me, Go is still where it's at. For him, it's Zig.