from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is Go used at Google? What do they use it for?

by taklimakan on 3/25/21, 3:29 PM with 6 comments

I recently spoke with a Googler friend (not an engineer) who told me that Go adoption within Google itself is quite limited.

Is that actually the case? Beside the very team that maintains the language, what other teams/products do use Go as their main programming language?

  • by nostrademons on 3/25/21, 3:41 PM

    It's used pretty extensively. Standard language for log analysis (across all products), plus a bunch of newer microservices are written in it. It tends to be more internal tools & services, because...

    Google has the disadvantage of history: a lot of the primary products were written before Go came out, and a lot of the newer products are spin-outs from existing codebases. It's very difficult to switch the language of a large existing codebase, and particularly difficult to switch the language to Go (because its runtime is incompatible with C++ and the JVM). You pretty much need a clean-sheet project, which occurs when there's a new microservice that talks via RPC, but almost never occurs in a primary consumer-facing product.

  • by mtmail on 3/25/21, 3:50 PM

    https://go.dev/solutions/google/ lists three Google projects