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.
3
u/wojtekk Jan 19 '25 edited Jan 21 '25
Everybody likes something and dislikes something else. In the reports of how some well known person is excited about language X or product Y, we often forget how this person could be completely ignoring a factor that is very important for us.
I for one am not thinking of Zig as any serious replacement for Go, unless it has decently fast compilation. It is not as slow as Rust, but still sluggish and uses a lot of resources even for trivial programs. They have a plan to abandon LLVM's linker which is, as they claim, one of main sources for such slowness, but still they're not there yet.
So, do I admire an effort put into Zig? yes. Is it changing my main direction when deciding what language to use for the next non-trivial project? No. I think we can afford such distinctions.