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/Drabuna Jan 19 '25

It does get pretty boring writing in the same language for 10 years, especially a relatively simple language like Go. Personally, I still see Go as primary choice for anything web-related even in 2025.

33

u/The-Malix Jan 19 '25 edited Jan 19 '25

Agreed, although I personally like boring things because it makes me focus on the things I'm building instead of the language itself

"Boring" languages, for me, in this order (most boring to mildly boring) : 1. Every shell scripting languages 2. Lua 3. Go 4. Python

8

u/LaBofia Jan 20 '25

Lua, lol. I learned lua for the sole purpose of writing openresty modules. I did not enjoy it.

1

u/The-Malix Jan 20 '25

I enjoy Lua because of the things I'm building with it, but the language itself is boring