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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Could you tell me more about it, please?

Google never cared for Go.

It wasn't created as a strategic project or investment. It's a language created by a small team on Google doing their thing.

It does keep paying them to work on Go though (and probably devoted some more people to it), so there's that, but Google neither hired them specifically for Go, nor requested that they work on such a project from the onset.

It was also never made THE official language for Google development by some decree, nor was getting it to Android any priority (they favored Kotlin for that in the end). Neither was it ever strongly marketed by Google to outside developers.

Dart/Angular got more of an official "sponsoring" from Google (including devoting a top notch compiler guy like Lars Bak to work for the former) than Golang. From what I've heard, it has seen adoption inside Google, but nothing game changing.

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There's no single official language at Google; it's a multi-language place. Google's build system (bazel) is multi-language. Internally, Go is as official as it gets.

While Java is most common, there's no single language for Android, either. C++ was always used for games, Kotlin is now officially supported, and Dart is in alpha via Flutter: https://flutter.io/

(Not to mention all the different languages supported on Cloud.)

Anything you say about "Google" caring for a language is probably true of some teams and not true of others.

>There's no single official language at Google; it's a multi-language place. Google's build system (bazel) is multi-language. Internally, Go is as official as it gets.

Not a Googler (or even close), so can't verify, but from what I've heard it's like this:

Google backend is C++, Java and Python. To this, they also allow Go now (and for some years).

But Go was never meant as a "create us an new official Google language to rule them all" directive, or even "create a language that solves Google scale programming issues". (I mean, the Go team had the latter issues in mind -- but, Google itself didn't, and didn't ask for such thing officially (in the way they officially jumpstarted projects like V8, or Dart, or GWT etc). The Go team created Google on their own, not as some official "new Google language" decree from above).

>While Java is most common, there's no single language for Android, either. C++ was always used for games, Kotlin is now officially supported, and Dart is in alpha via Flutter: https://flutter.io/*

Well, it might sound like there are 3 languages now (and 4 soonish), but officially apps were meant to be coded in Java/Davlik, and high perf games in C++ for almost a decade. So, as far as Android official languages go, it has been Java all the way for app development for ages...

I thought Go was created to be the primary language for new Googlers. Did that never turn out to be the case? Are there many Google projects written in Go? Kubernetes is the only one that immediately springs to mind.

Downloads are powered by Go, which was a huge port from C++.
https://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-dl.slide

That's a single project, and one of the 2 adoption stories circulating in 2012/3, 4+ years ago (the other was a MySQL load balancer for YouTube or such).
I'm pretty sure there is quite more stuff now, but those known are not much to write home about. Even downloads is not some "huge port" -- the presentation mentions "14,032" lines.

>the other was a MySQL load balancer for YouTube or such
It was Vitesse:
http://vitess.io/overview/
https://github.com/youtube/vitess

> That's a single project, and one of the 2 adoption stories circulating in 2012/3, 4+ years ago (the other was a MySQL load balancer for YouTube or such).
The parent comment was asking about projects so I presented one that sprung to mind.
> Even downloads is not some "huge port" -- the presentation mentions "14,032" lines.
Yes, it mentions "39 files (14,032 lines) deleted" which is not small in my mind. Not to mention they heavily leveraged the standard library and some other projects like groupcache.

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