Query about decision regarding use of Go

[gangliaghost]

Hello,

I am a fan of the GCS and am looking to write something related to this program. I was interested in hearing about the reasoning behind using Go as the language for this project. I want my project to be accessible for many people, but would like a compiled language for speed. My friend, who has followed this project longer than I have, says that you used a different language in the past. Can I ask what prompted the switch, and what the pros of using this language in this context are? Thank you!

[richardwilkes]

The very first version of GCS (back in the 90's) used C and only ran on classic MacOS. I then moved to C++. After a while, I then switched to Java to get it running on Linux & Windows as well. I stayed with Java for a very long time (20+ years). Back in 2015, I started using Go in my work and really enjoyed developing in it. Eventually, I decided I wanted to use Go for GCS... but there were some hurdles, the biggest of which was graphics / UI support, which was virtually non-existent. I looked at some of the fledgling projects out there that provided some UI support (such as fyne, gio, etc.), but none of them worked in a way that I felt was workable for me... so I eventually just sat down and wrote my own (the https://github.com/richardwilkes/unison project).

Some of the reasons I wanted to switch to Go:

• Single native binary for deployment
• Much better startup performance
• Great support for embedding a web server -- not something I currently use for GCS, but it is something I've tinkered with on and off to support a web-accessible GCS and even had a prototype working for a while a couple of years ago
• Simple, easy to learn and understand language
• Great tooling for development

Some downsides:

• Fewer people know Go at the moment, which means fewer potential people to contribute to the code base. I'm not sure that really matters, though, since I've done the vast majority of all changes even when it was Java and I don't foresee that changing.
• I had to write my own UI support... but that's also a plus, since it means it does exactly what I want/need... and any deficiencies are my fault :-)

Anyway, hopefully the above answered your question.