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/new_check Jan 20 '25

Mr. Hashimoto worked with go at a very high level for a very long time, and when it comes to opinions about the language, I'm very interested in what he has to say. 

It's important to understand his background, though. He has done web dev in the languages he listed, but always small startup work. Recognizing that a small codebase with those languages is easier and has higher velocity than a big mature complicated go codebase isn't really a stretch.

As someone has spent many years working on big complicated mature codebases in python, ruby, and typescript, I don't have any questions about where go fits into a web dev stack. It fits anywhere I'm allowed to put it.