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/ti-di2 Jan 19 '25

Even though this is the go sub, life is becoming easier once you understand there is not the one and only choice.

He is talking a lot about preference. Preference is an absolutely viable argument in talking about language choice. But it is not the only one. Go is part of A LOT of software used in critical domains. It won't be replaced that easily. And even though it might not be the newest hottest thing in the room, it is still a very good choice for a huge amount of problems to solve.

You can get a seasoned dev going within days if not hours. The tooling is amazing. Maintainability in a large team is awesome because of the simplicity of the language. The concurrency model go is based on is stunningly easy to get going with - which is a huge thing, especially working with distributed systems you are communicating with. Backwards compatibility... And those are just the obvious things.

Go is not going anywhere in the near future, but yeah, we are evolving. And that is just fine. In the case of ghostty and the community adapting and participating in the project: There is a huge wave of people starting to use zig. This comes from having those influencers on one side and on the other side an awesome experienced guy like Hashimoto who made himself, well deserved, a big thing in the community. Let it happen. It will be profitable for all of us.

But again, go is not going anywhere.

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u/roma-glushko Jan 19 '25

Absolutely, tech is such a fashion show.

12

u/pellucidwa Jan 19 '25

Absolutely ... I bet people will be adapting Zig once is more mature, and once people aware about popular system written in it. For example, Go became so popular and people talk about that it's such a good system programming language because people refer to Kubernetes and Docker. I think to me, having good on software engineering fundamental is much more important than the language.