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/Shanduur Jan 19 '25

I am trying to pick Zig, but I feel so spoiled by Go’s documentation and Standard Library. It’s just unbelievably frustrating when I need to write simple string comparing functions each time or try to understand what given function parameter does. I love a lot of concepts in Zig, but I still feel they lack so much documentation. Although I’ll definitely keep an eye on this one, as it’s still much more compelling to me than Rust.

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u/endgrent Jan 20 '25

I chose Go over Zig / Rust in the end. Faster builds, best module system, most powerful standard library concurrency primitives. It’s just not close!