Hacker News Reader

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the way these kinds of things happen at Google. Most projects of this nature have to work to get internal adoption just like any external toolchain. There's almost never an "edict from on high" that a project will use a particular technology (except to the extent that most code in production has to be written in a set of approved languages; a language created by Google itself still has to surmount this hurdle).

Pike, along with other Go team members, have been heavily involved in solving very large-scale problems (e.g., http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...) for a long time now, so they are solving the pain they've personally experienced. But other teams at Google will treat Go just like developers in the world at large do -- with skepticism, until it's proven itself. It's doing so now, but it will take some time before you see heavy adoption, which is the way it should be with any new system of this magnitude.

>I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the way these kinds of things happen at Google. Most projects of this nature have to work to get internal adoption just like any external toolchain.

Well, Dart and V8 are too examples to the contrary.

Not really.

V8 was simply a drop-in replacement for existing Javascript VM's, so there was no "adoption" curve, per se. It ran something like 40x faster than the one in WebKit when it was released, so everyone just said "Awesome, thumbs up! Stick it in there."

Google is spending some developer relations resources promoting Dart, probably because it's the kind of project that requires more public buy-in (including a VM that ultimately needs WebKit hooks, which is not solely controlled by Google). But it still has to surmount the same hurdles to internal adoption that other tools and languages do. I'm no longer privy to the details, but I'm fairly certain that there are just a few internal teams trying out Dart right now, to help it get its "sea legs".

And that's really the way it should be. These things don't happen overnight, and edicts from on high that a particular team will use a new technology don't usually work out well.

>V8 was simply a drop-in replacement for existing Javascript VM's, so there was no "adoption" curve

I never said anything about adoption curve. I'm talking about money spend by Google on the project and promotion done by them on it. V8 had a large team assembled, with a star compiler guy, was heavily promoted with marketing material, website and even several videos.

Of course V8 was part of their plan to take over the web browser, whereas Go is just a language for them. Well, my sentiments exactly.

> Sure there should be some other small projects, but nothing earth shattering, the way C++/Java are used

Go is an incredibly young language - it only just received its first official release a few months ago, and yet it already has two complete and independent compiler implementations (both gc and the more optimized[1] gccgo), as well as a staggering number of libraries for most common tasks.

As someone who enjoys toying around with developing languages, I've been blown away by how solid the entire Go ecosystem is at this early stage.

> The story, as told also by Rob Pike elsewhere, speaks of some guys getting together t hack on a new language on some pain points THEY had, and mostly as a side project.

I think every language (or every project) has as many stories of its origin as there are creators - if not more. They're not mutually exclusive, as you seem to make it look.

[1] in that it takes advantage of gcc, which is incredibly well-optimized for non-concurrent applications, that is

llgo (an llvm go compiler written in go) is also happily on its way to being a third compiler. Andrew Wilkins recently made a statement that he was able to get some Go code running in Chrome via PNaCl. Pretty exciting stuff.

I'd bet Pike, Thompson and Griesemer, as Google developers themselves, knew Google's problems for developers even better than "Google as a corporate entity" would have. It's true that they weren't asked by anyone upstairs to face these problems, but that's how Google works.