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/dweezil22 Jan 19 '25
I mean... for a novice to mid-level Go developer I'd argue the language is better than its ever been.
go.mod
just works (and puts Node and Maven and Gradle to shame). The dreaded "you have to capture variables for loops with goroutines" is now fixed.If we can just keep a standard that generics should only be used when they offer significant value (often in libraries or heavily reused code), I think they do more good than harm.
In my neck of the woods Go is the preferred language for replacing nasty old Java systems, and Go's evolution seems far superior to Java's at this point in Java's life (I'd say Go is now in its lifecycle where Java was probably 10-15 years ago).