[HN Gopher] Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead
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Russ Cox is stepping down as the Go tech lead
Author : bojanz
Score : 235 points
Date : 2024-08-01 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.google.com)
| ainar-g wrote:
| Thank you, rsc, for all your work. Development in Go has become
| much more enjoyable in these 12 years: race detector,
| standardized error wrapping, modules, generics, toolchain
| updates, and so on. And while there are still things to be
| desired (sum types, better enum/range types, immutability, and
| non-nilness in my personal wishlist), Go is still the most
| enjoyable ecosystem I've ever developed in.
| vyskocilm wrote:
| Well written list of what made Go better language during last
| years. I'd add iterators, the recent big thing from Russ.
| galkk wrote:
| Wow. I haven't followed Go for a while, thanks for that note.
|
| Iterators are very nice addition, even with typical Go
| fashion of quite ugly syntax.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Nomination for RSC's greatest technical contribution: module
| versioning. Absolutely fundamental to the language ecosystem.
|
| https://research.swtch.com/vgo-intro
| maxmcd wrote:
| Agreed, see the index of those posts:
| https://research.swtch.com/vgo
|
| Other contenders I find myself sharing and re-reading:
|
| - https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html
|
| - https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html
|
| - https://research.swtch.com/bisect
|
| - https://research.swtch.com/zip
| tschellenbach wrote:
| Thank you, amazing language :)
| throwawaygo wrote:
| I have so many disagreements on goals for the language with Russ,
| but have been a fan since his early days of writing the regex
| package and the c-to-go conversion code. Glad to hear he will
| still contribute to the lang, and hoping for a bit different
| direction from the new leads.
| tomcam wrote:
| IMHO Go has been one of the best-managed open source projects
| ever. Hats off to Google for supporting it.
| hoten wrote:
| What are some things that make it well managed?
| ein0p wrote:
| Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking
| changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change
| it easily. That is important for a programming language, and
| it doesn't happen organically.
| dom96 wrote:
| Zero drama is easy when you get paid (a lot) to work on
| something.
| muratsu wrote:
| Huhhh? Have you ever worked at a large enough company
| where stakeholder interests are not aligned?
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's private drama. For all we know there has been
| loads, but it's private so you can't see it.
| ein0p wrote:
| That's unfair. There's plenty of drama in projects with
| all sorts of funding situations. Look at eg Rust. Lots of
| drama and it's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a
| year ago would work today.
| lkirkwood wrote:
| > It's anyone's guess if the code you wrote a year ago
| would work today
|
| Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression
| the editions took care of that.
| seeekr wrote:
| Not true, not sure why GP said that. Been writing Rust
| for many years and code does not just break on compiler
| upgrades. Super stable overall, including the wonderfully
| evolving ecosystem!
| sangnoir wrote:
| And yet we've had lots of drama in Linux and Redhat
| mailing lists, involving people paid to work on the
| respective projects using their work email.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| I would rather say that it is easy to have zero drama
| when most of the committers come from a single large
| companies.
| Maxatar wrote:
| Getting paid has nothing to do with drama. Plenty of high
| paid people get involved in drama and infighting across
| all walks of life including tech.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| I suspect all the drama happens internally.
| purpleidea wrote:
| Huge news! I hope the new leadership remembers that keeping
| golang small and simple was its greatest strength. Adding
| generics was too much, and while I think there are some important
| small cases when it's valuable, in practice people are using it
| when they shouldn't. I'd also like to see less google control of
| the project.
|
| I'm certainly thankful for golang as it made my
| https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ project possible!
|
| Thanks Russ!
| simonz05 wrote:
| > I'd also like to see less google control of the project.
|
| That doesn't look like is going to happen -- the leadership
| change announced here seems to me to continue on the Google
| path. Both Austin and Cherry are relatively unknown outside
| Google and are to my knowledge not active in the community
| outside Google.
| rsc wrote:
| > Both Austin and Cherry are relatively unknown outside
| Google and are to my knowledge not active in the community
| outside Google.
|
| I don't believe this is true at all. They are both highly
| active in external Go development, far more active than I
| have been these past few years. (It's true that neither gives
| talks or blogs as much as I do.)
| simonz05 wrote:
| I understand and respect your perspective on Austin and
| Cherry's involvement in the Go community. Their
| contributions may indeed be less visible but still
| impactful. However, the community's perception of
| leadership is crucial, and visibility plays a big part in
| that. For instance your long form blog adds context to
| decisions you've taken in the past. I hope their active
| roles will become more apparent, fostering a stronger
| connection with the broader Go community.
| arp242 wrote:
| > I'd also like to see less google control of the project.
|
| What does this even mean? Google basically just finances the
| project, but doesn't really "control" anything, never mind that
| "Google" isn't a monolithic entity in the first place.
| purpleidea wrote:
| They could be a non-google employee. They could let the
| community vote on who new leaders are, etc...
| arp242 wrote:
| > They could let the community vote on who new leaders are,
| etc...
|
| Who is "they"? Who is "the community"? Who qualifies for a
| vote and who doesn't? I never contributed any code to the
| Go compiler or stdlib, but have contributed to some aspects
| of the "wider ecosystem", including some things that see
| fairly broad usage, and am (coincidentally) wearing a 2018
| GopherCon t-shirt as I write this. Do I qualify? Does
| someone who has been writing Go for a year qualify? A week?
| Someone who never even wrote Go code? Someone who sent in a
| single patch to stdlib? And how do you verify all this?
|
| Saying "let the community vote" is easy, but if you think
| about it for more than a second you will realize there's
| tons of difficulties and that it doesn't really work. I
| also don't really know of any project that works like this:
| it's pretty always a fairly small group of "core
| contributors" that get to decide.
| tempest_ wrote:
| What do you mean it doesnt really work? There are a large
| number of programming languages and open source projects
| and a large number of approaches to this problem.
|
| Python, Postgres, Rust..
|
| A small amount of core contributors doesn't mean they all
| have to come from a single corporate entity either.
|
| The notion that only Google could shepherd a programming
| language is hilarious.
| arp242 wrote:
| > The notion that only Google could shepherd a
| programming language is hilarious.
|
| I never said anything of the sort. I said that "let the
| community vote on who new leaders are" doesn't work.
| Python, PostgreSQL, and Rust don't work like that either;
| it's just members of a fairly small "core team" that can
| vote, or some variant thereof. I have no inside knowledge
| here, but I'll stake a good amount of money that the Go
| core team had a lot of discussions about this, and de-
| facto, it's more or less the same as having a vote -
| except maybe a bit less formal.
|
| And Go would obviously be fine without Google, just as
| Rust was fine without Mozilla. But why bother? It's
| working fine as it is and Google wants to spend the money
| on developer salaries, so why not let them? People get
| far too hung up on "Google bad". I say this as someone
| who doesn't even have a Google account or Chrome
| installed.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I think Googles good will in recent years is the problem.
|
| I think Rust is better divorced from Mozilla, and Go
| would be better if it was divorced a bit from Google for
| a lot of the same reasons.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > Adding generics was too much
|
| I strongly disagree. Sure, like anything in programming,
| generics can be misused. But even comments can be misused!
|
| OTOH I am able to build things in Go with generics that I would
| not be very happy building without them.
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Yeah I agree. Due to Go's slow moving approach we'll see the
| biggest impact of generics much later, when they become more
| prominent in the standard library. A lot of those APIs are
| necessarily not type safe now and generics would close that
| gap quite nicely
| skywhopper wrote:
| Russ has done a great job of shepherding Go through over a decade
| of growth and maturity and has led a ton of fantastic additions
| to the language and built a strong pattern of excellence in how
| language changes are considered and made that should serve as a
| shining example for the future of Go as well as any other
| language out there.
|
| And now he's continuing the stretch of outstanding leadership by
| passing the torch. I can wait to see what the next 12 years of Go
| brings. Thanks for your service, Russ!
| shoggouth wrote:
| Thanks for working to create such a great language!
| rollulus wrote:
| Since rsc frequents HN: I'd like to thank you for all the work
| you've put into this great language. Peak HN hype cycle I decided
| to pick up Go and never regretted it. Thank you.
| simonz05 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwoWei-GAPo -- Project has come a
| long way since this. Happy that it's still around and thriving. I
| don't think we expected that in 2009. I don't believe Go would
| have been where it is without Russ. His contribution to the
| project has been tremendous.
|
| Thanks Russ.
| meling wrote:
| Thanks Russ for your great leadership and contributions to the Go
| community. I've always enjoy your talks, blogs, and your many
| contributions to the language. Looking forward to your future
| contributions to the language and ecosystem.
| Thaxll wrote:
| RSC has a really good blog: https://research.swtch.com/
| jjice wrote:
| Incredible blog. I've said it on this site before, but his
| series on regular expressions is insanely high quality and the
| fact he just posted it there for all of us is a huge privilege.
| dondraper36 wrote:
| rsc, thank you very much for all the hard work on the language
| that brought me into software engineering.
|
| Despite playing around with several programming languages, Go
| still feels like home.
|
| The development experience is terrific and I really appreciate
| how unapologetically simple and responsible the language and its
| creators have been.
|
| Good luck and all the best in all your endeavours!
| rsc wrote:
| > rsc, thank you very much for all the hard work on the
| language that brought me into software engineering.
|
| You're quite welcome, and thank you for this comment. I never
| expected when we started that Go would have such a positive
| impact on people's lives, bringing new people into programming
| and software engineering. That's definitely the impact I'm most
| proud of.
| geoka9 wrote:
| Thank you guys from another fan! Go literally saved my career
| as a software dev: got burned out around 2014, tried Go as
| therapy and have been a happy gopher ever since :)
| igmor wrote:
| Go team has built a remarkable tool under your leadership. A tool
| that moved a niddle to the better side of things for the
| industry. Thank you and God speed!
| septune wrote:
| Thanks Russ and infinite kudos to you
| mseepgood wrote:
| Please make more Ivy videos
| xyst wrote:
| I think the only reason I used go at some point was because of
| Russ Cox. Have joined the dark side and switched to rust ;).
|
| Wonder what he's going to do next? Maybe just moving around
| within G? or another OSS project within G?
| dochtman wrote:
| The post actually contains some references to what he's working
| on next, some kind of LLM agent to facilitate software
| development processes?
| nasretdinov wrote:
| Russ gave us proper vendoring and generics: two things I thought
| I'd never see in Go... Thanks a lot for the effort!
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| Out of interest, why are people so confident in Google when it
| comes to Go, yet every other day there's articles about how
| Google can't be trusted in related to Dart/Flutter which are soon
| to be abandoned?
| bufo wrote:
| Because Go has massive traction both inside and outside of
| Google, whereas Dart/Flutter never got big traction.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| > Google can't be trusted in related to Dart/Flutter which are
| soon to be abandoned
|
| source?
| hgyjnbdet wrote:
| I'm not agreeing with that assessment but recently:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997745
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40184763
|
| Among others. Again I'm not saying I agree, I'm just saying
| you don't see the same with Go.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| Off the top of your head, name 3 projects/apps that use
| Dart/Flutter, now do the same for go.
| bitpush wrote:
| If you cant name 3 projects/app that use Dart/Flutter that
| just shows your bias.
|
| Can you name 3 apps/projects that use COBOL?
|
| -- This is akin to asking, "Quick, name 3 books written in
| Persian. Huh, you cant name them? Must be a dead language"
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't really know anything about Dart or Flutter, but they're
| entirely separate teams within a huge organisation. It's
| entirely possible that one team does an excellent job, whereas
| the other doesn't. I keep repeating this: but "Google" is not a
| monolithic entity. People aren't "confident in Google", they're
| "confident in the people working on Go" (or not: you can decide
| that for yourself).
| declan_roberts wrote:
| There are features of the Go toolchain that I consider to be a
| _requirement_ in all future languages.
|
| For example, if a language doesn't come with a built-in formatter
| that's a huge red flag. Go broke the tyranny of style
| discussions.
|
| Easy static binaries is right up there for all new languages.
|
| Kudos to rsc and team for all the work that went into making a
| great language. Good luck on your next projects.
| alphazard wrote:
| > I don't believe that the "BDFL" (benevolent dictator for life)
| model is healthy for a person or a project
|
| It's interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the
| best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.
| groby_b wrote:
| The only people worth having in power are the ones that don't
| want the power.
|
| This extends well beyond OSS projects.
| zmj wrote:
| Thanks Russ! Putting tooling on a first-class basis was
| revolutionary, and it's still Go's standout feature.
| coolThingsFirst wrote:
| Kinda a bad career move to lead this annoying little language.
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