> If Rob Pike wasn't involved in this language, it would be completely invisible.
Being the last item on Ken Thompson's resume prior to his retirement makes it kind of visible, too.
> So, there's not a lot of concrete evidence that Go has made any inroads inside Google against Java and C++ and from what I can see, the language is hardly every used outside Google as well.
I did for over 5 years. While I left before the Go programming language was released, I seriously doubt they've transitioned much of the codebase to it, for one simple reason:
The Google codebase is fucking massive. I simply cannot describe how unbelievably huge it is, and while I don't doubt for a second that Go will be used for some of the systems-level projects (some of which Rob Pike is directly involved with - how's that for vague), you simply don't transition that big of a codebase to a new language.
It would basically be impossible... unless you're Jeff Dean.
Thank you. That's fair, but I think a better metric of the success of Go - which is how this train of thought started - would be how much new stuff is being started with it, for just the reason you stated. It'd be nutty to rewrite a bunch of working code.
In addition to the difficulty of rewriting existing code, even when you program something new at Google, you'd be a fool not to leverage what infrastructure already exists. If you try to do that while at the same time writing the new project in Go, you run into weird interoperability issues.
That's a good point, though protocol buffers aren't used for everything. There's more tightly-bound systems stuff going on, plus libraries and so forth. Which is to say, I have no idea.
Being the last item on Ken Thompson's resume prior to his retirement makes it kind of visible, too.
> So, there's not a lot of concrete evidence that Go has made any inroads inside Google against Java and C++ and from what I can see, the language is hardly every used outside Google as well.
Do you work at Google?