Cloud Native Go, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Why Go Rules the Cloud Native World

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.¹

E. F. Schumacher, “Small Is Beautiful” (August 1973)

The Motivation Behind Go

The idea of Go emerged in September of 2007 at Google, the inevitable outcome of putting a bunch of smart people in a room and frustrating the heck out of them.

The people in question were Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, all already highly regarded for their individual work in designing other languages. The source of their collective ire was nothing less than the entire set of programming languages that were available at the time, which they were finding just weren’t well-suited to the task of describing the kinds of distributed, scalable, resilient services that Google was building.²

Essentially, the common languages of the day had been developed in a different era, one before multiple processors were commonplace and networks were quite so ubiquitous. Their support for multicore processing and networking—essential building blocks of modern cloud native services³—was often limited or required extraordinary efforts to utilize. Simply put, programming languages weren’t keeping up with the needs of modern software development.

Features for a Cloud Native World

Their frustrations were many, but all of them amounted to one thing: the undue complexity of the languages they were working ...