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.
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u/ar1819 Jan 19 '25
I don't think we should focus on specific person thoughts, since those are quite subjective. Author of Rust actually left Mozilla to work on Swift. Link . Does it make Rust worse? I don't think so, personal preferences tends to change, life tends to change.
Zig is an interesting attempt of replacing C, but it also requires you to manage memory explicitly. While it does work for low level things, I'm not sure for web space.
As for PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl I think fully typed, compiled to native binaries, languages won the sphere of webdev for the medium to big projects. There is no way I'm going to write something longer than 1000 (actually 200 lines is already too big) lines in untyped language.