[oddthink]

There's just so much C++ at Google that really has no business being C++ and falls into the "networked server" category. At least large swaths of the Search and Maps codebase, large chunks of flume (beam) batch pipelines, etc., etc. It's only historical accident and network-effect stickiness that keep that from being written in Java.

I could easily imagine him thinking Go could make inroads there. But then it took a very long time to get a flume port, and even then it didn't have half of the nice affordances that the C++ version did.

People say they need the efficiencies of C++, but IMHO they really don't when so much of the actual code time is spent slurping data from one sstable and writing it to the next sstable.