The March Towards Go

Today, TJ Holowaychuk, one of node.js’ most prolific module writers (express, jade, mocha, koa) has announced he’s leaving node.js for Go:

And PopTip:

It’s not just node.js users making the switch. Others are too. One of Python’s most visible users, Dropbox — who also employs Python’s creator Guido van Rossum — recently announced it has migrated major parts of its back-end infrastructure from Python to Go:

And, less surprisingly, Google is also switching projects over:

Naturally, it’s not just existing projects making the switch. New high-profile projects are also started using Go. Most well-known is probably Docker. Many project using Docker under the hood are also written in Go, such as Flynn, a Docker-based PaaS. Go 1.0 was only released 2 years ago. Clearly there’s a lot of momentum to use it for building high-performance web servers now. It’s fast, easy to distribute (because it produces a single statically linked binary) and has good async features without “callback hell.”

Not looking at Go yet? It may be a good time to do so now — everybody else is.

Discussion on Reddit and Hacker News.

• Golang
• Programming