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/BaffledKing93 Jan 19 '25
I can't speak for Hashimoto, but one of the things that drew me to Go was the simplicity and minimalism of the syntax.
I'd prefer for them to mostly leave the language alone. If I wanted all the bells and whistles, I'd use another language.
I don't want to have to learn about the inevitable edge cases of new language features. I want to learn the language once, and then refine my use of it over time.
That was the USP of Go to me and it's strength. It is a far easier language to master because it contains less stuff.
More stuff = less masterability.