Is it time to plan a move to Go?

[Eric S. Raymond]

John D. Bell <jdb at systemsartisans.com>:
> Not to be the grognard here, but trying to weigh in from the
> (theoretical) customers' perspective.
> 
> Since we're trying to get adoption by big-site sysadmins, who are (or
> tend to be) a technically conservative bunch, I'm concerned that they
> will see code in a "brand-new" language as possibly too risky.  (Yes,
> they nearly always install from vendor- or distro-supplied packages, so
> binaries only.  But the implication of "you can always download and
> build your own from source" means that the source language has _some_
> weight in their considerations.)

On the other hand, being able to say: "No resource leaks or buffer 
overrun exploits *ever again*" is a pretty big deal, probably big
enough to obviate that objection.

I say "probably" because I'm not dismissing your concern, it is valid.
Moving to a relatively untried language could have that effect - I'd
worry about it for Rust or D or Dart.

Go is, though, special for one reason: the mighty Goog.  Those large-site
admins are also the most likely to know that Google is moving a lot
of its server software to Go.  If it's good enough for them to sink
megabucks into...
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

My work is funded by the Internet Civil Engineering Institute: https://icei.org
Please visit their site and donate: the civilization you save might be your own.