Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> Yet most of those are written in Go. In fact, the majority of the devops tools themselves (podman, k8s, etc) seem to be written in Go.

> Why do you think that is?

Because time travel, as far as we can tell, is not possible.

At least in the case of Kubernetes, Rust 1.0 wasn't even around until the year after it was first released (Kubernetes 2014, Rust 1.0 2015). It also came out of Google and Go was one of its blessed languages at the time (and today). Given Rust 1.0 wasn't out yet, I'd be surprised if it got more than five seconds of consideration by the team developing Kubernetes, if it was even on their radar at the time they started development.




IMO it's because boring, predictable, un-exciting tech often gets the job done, while shiny, exciting, enjoyable tech gets the job done less.


It's fair to have an opinion, and that may be why Kubernetes hasn't been rewritten in Rust, but I answered the question of why it wasn't written in Rust. It wasn't an option at the time (again, time travel is not possible).


This is a myth pushed by the "Choose Boring Technology" cult [1] and proven false by Google [2].

[1]: https://boringtechnology.club/

[2]: https://www.ardanlabs.com/news/2024/rust-at-google


K8s was absolutely built using exciting tech....Golang was hot off the presses. The brand new hotness. Google's internal Borg was C++, so the boring choice was C++ which wasn't chosen. Also they were google employees, which also adds a bit of bias in selection I would imagine.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: