[ampersandy]

I really dislike this meme of pointing out that Google has deprecated a lot of projects. Do people actually expect Google to staff people & resources running every project they've released forever?

A more interesting comparison would be open source projects that Google has abandoned or failed to properly hand over control of to the community, especially if we're talking about Go.

[CraigJPerry]

It’s not clear to me that Go would survive Google giving up its continued investment.

Go has the fundamentals to survive - it’s open source, it has a healthy amount of contribution from non-google employees, the compiler is written in Go (that’s important when you consider an alternative situation like a python or js developer who wants to contribute a change to their compiler (they need to learn c / c++ respectively), i strongly suspect that if google walked away tomorrow, the velocity of change to the compiler, stdlib etc would not massively drop in the short term.

Medium / long term though… would i bet on Go over Java? It’s not clear to me that Go has reached the level of market penetration to make that a simple question.

Edit: i meant to add halo projects like docker, kube etc. as reasons to suggest the Go community is healthy

[morelisp]

I think we have some models of what would happen to Go without Google, it's probably similar to what happened to Java under the weaker period of Oracle's stewardship.

The tool as-it-is keeps chugging along pretty well and even improving in small ways, but it stops reacting to larger trends and misses the boat at critical moments. Some new language in the same space comes up and finds it easy to shear off a massive portion of its user base by doing "the same thing, but modern".

(Less obvious models would be PHP to backend JS, and PHP and Python to Go, which had similar community development arcs.)

[UncleMeat]

I agree.

It is true that Google has some poor product management and has some hilariously inept examples or product coherency (chat being the biggest disaster). But people praise startups for pivoting (read: killing a product) and (in general) demand innovation over glacial iteration. Trying new stuff necessarily means killing things that don't work (or paying a whole bunch of engineers to maintain a dead product for eternity).

[cy_hauser]

>> But people praise startups for pivoting ...

Yes, but you discount the size of Google. Some of the things Google has killed have been large enough to have been considered successful products for a startup. They kill a "tiny" product because it's only large enough to be what some startup hopes to become. Google Reader is my favorite example of this. Multiple companies now exist in the soil on top of that grave.