

Ask HN: Future of Go? - humility

In my opinion, everything google touches turns into mud (viz. sparrow, angular etc) - even though it is quite lucrative at this point, is it worth investing time learning &amp; considering Go for serious backend development? Pardon me for my naiveté.<p>Honorary mention: didgoogleshutdown.com
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matthewmacleod
I don't think it's going to go anywhere (heh) but I do think it will find its
niche - you can see this in things like Docker and Kubernetes.

It serves a useful function, being somewhere between a pleasant, slow and
somewhat less dependable scripting language like Ruby or Python, and a fast,
dangerous language like C. It's perfect for writing lower-lever distributed
systems, and is terrifically boring in a way that a reliable language designed
to handle these sorts of systems should be.

So I don't think it's going anywhere. It's great for writing the plumbing that
powers everything. I don't want to build web apps with it, but there are
plenty of other options for that.

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humility
Mayhaps it's not _ideal_ for backend development, right?

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SEJeff
Go is quickly becoming _the_ defacto language for writing cloud management and
tooling. Look no further than both docker[1] and kubernetes[2] for a very wide
community. Kubernetes in specific has a very diverse community with people
from dozens of companies rallying behind Google with some serious developer
manpower behind it.

Then there are companies like cloudflare[3] which while you might not have
heard of them, run much of the underlying infrastructure that a large swath of
the internet depends upon. Companies like hashicorp[4], makers of consul and
packer. etc, etc. Go is opinionated, love it or hate it, it is here to stay.
It fills a really nice gap between python and C and is a slam dunk for
building distributed services, which is what it was designed for.

[1] [http://www.docker.com/](http://www.docker.com/)

[2] [http://kubernetes.io/](http://kubernetes.io/)

[3] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/go-at-
cloudflare/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/go-at-cloudflare/)

[4] [https://hashicorp.com/](https://hashicorp.com/)

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tptacek
Google can't shut down Golang. It's a public open source project. It's likely
Google isn't even its biggest user anymore.

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bmurphy1976
Works pretty great, has a strong community, many contributors outside of
Google. I highly doubt it's going anywhere (much to some peoples' dismay I
suppose).

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nailer
Go seems solid - I'm not a go person - the kind of stuff I make generally
doesn't need it - but even outside traditional C communities Go is super
popular. I know modulus use it for their load balancer (rather than node,
which is interesting) and the CoreOS and GoSquared folks I've spoken to think
it's pretty rad too.

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starptech
The future is now. Learn Go, learn how to handle an another way of
programming. Earn the benefits and either it's the right tool otherwise you go
further. It's really depends on your needs. When I should something to say
about my experience with Go then that Go has a nice minimalistic type-system,
you will appreciate that.

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GutenYe
Point made, it's open source and even without Google, we still have
communities. For these who are interested, you can Google Ruby history.

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Tankenstein
I am also interested in this. I'm reading a lot about it, and goroutines look
fantastic.

