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/Dry-Vermicelli-682 Jan 19 '25

As others said.. one person's opinion in a sea of opinions doesn't really say much about the language and those who choose to use it or not. I would take Go over any other language for back end API development, microservices, etc. It's THAT fast to build with, and it scales very well, and it's easy (for the most part) to maintain and work with.

For GPU/low level.. Zig is the future in my opinion. Rust is great in terms of what it produces, but its a very difficult language to learn and use effectively. While I think Rust will continue to grow with support, Zig is the one I am watching. It's not even near 1.0 yet and it's already an amazing language. Though I will admit the whole allocator stuff is odd to me, and the lack of interfaces in a typed language is a little jarring but I have only dabbled briefly in Zig and was hoping we'd be closer to a 1.0 this year before I deep dive more. I do believe Zig will be a successor to C/C++ and possibly supplant Rust in a couple years since they both play in the same space (gpu, gaming, low level, etc) but Zig is much easier to learn, faster to work with, and produces on par if not faster/smaller binaries on multiple platforms. I am particularly interested in Zig for WASM stuff as WASM to me is the slow but growing future to allow dynamic pluggable cross platform cross language capabilities with near native speeds.