The case for go (with citations!)

gistfile1.txt

Team behind Go:
  - Ken Thompson
    - Co-Creator of Unix
    - Co-Creator of UTF-8
    - Creator of 'B', the direct predecessor to the 'C' programming language

  - Rob Pike
    - Co-Creator of Unix
    - Co-Creator of UTF-8
    - Co-Authored Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment with Brian Kernighan

  - Brad Fitzgerald (more recently)
    - Creator of memcached


Adoption within Google
  - Public projects:
    - All db traffic for YouTube flows through a proxy system written in Go.
      - https://github.com/youtube/vitess
    - Rewrote the pre-cdn download server from c++ to go
      - http://talks.golang.org/2013/oscon-dl.slide#1
    - The Thanksgiving interactive google logo on Google.com
      - http://blog.golang.org/from-zero-to-go-launching-on-google
      - Maintained ~40ms response times on the Google homepage, including jpeg encoding
    - Used to rewrite some c++ systems
      - http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/rewriting-large-production-system-in-go.html

Adoption outside of Google
  - Over 10,000 open-source packages: http://godoc.org/-/index
  - Over 400 contributors: http://golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS
  - Heroku, one of the largest PaaS providers. http://blog.golang.org/go-at-heroku
  - Cloudflare, an accelerating CDN uses Go in a variety of places. Publicly, in its local agent which is supported by dozens of hosting companies. http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-railgun-easier-than-ever
  - MongoDB, our database provider uses go for its backup agent. http://blog.mongodb.org/post/51643994762/go-agent-go
  - Bitly is using it to process billions(!) of messages per day. https://github.com/bitly/nsq
  - Disqus is using it for notifications in their widely-deployed comment system. http://blog.disqus.com/post/51155103801/trying-out-this-go-thing
  - Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) us Go in its services-coordination system (Juju). http://dave.cheney.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/august-go-meetup.pdf
  - Thompson Reuters hires Go developers - http://www.gopheracademy.com/jobs/show/3 
  - Many, many more: https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/GoUsers

Tools
  - Excellent CPU and Memory profiler: http://blog.golang.org/profiling-go-programs
  - Race condition detector: http://blog.golang.org/race-detector
  - Good gdb support for debugging: http://golang.org/doc/gdb
  - Eclipse support: https://code.google.com/p/goclipse/

Learning Go
  "None of the engineers on the team have taken very long at all to come up to speed in the language; heck, even one of our interns picked it up in a couple of days." - http://bit.ly/14NxLnc

  Easy to learn interactively: http://tour.golang.org/#1

Going from Ruby to golang
  The creator of Sinatra (the ruby framework we use) now uses Go and has released Sinatra's `Go` successor.
    - https://github.com/bmizerany/pat and other projects https://github.com/bmizerany?tab=repositories

  "Python and Ruby programmers come to Go because they don’t have to surrender much expressiveness, but gain performance and get to play with concurrency."
    - Rob Pike

  http://bit.ly/ZGHF9d
    - Currently handling > 100 million messages / day
    - Experienced Java programmers spent the last few years in Ruby and decided to do a rewrite in Go after evaluating Java, Scala, Node.js and Erlang.

    "Our CPU utilization was less than 5% and the entire process started up with only a few hundred KB's of memory (on startup) vs our Rails apps which were ~50MB (on startup). Compare that even to JVM memory usage! It was night and day. "

  http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/07/go-at-soundcloud/
    - Mainly a Ruby/Rails shop that started adding more services in Go.
    - "An environment of shared code ownership is a perfect match for expressive, productive languages with low barriers to entry, and Go has proven to be exactly that.[...] All together, SoundCloud maintains about half a dozen services and over a dozen repositories written entirely in Go. And we’re increasingly turning to Go when spinning up new backend projects."

  http://www.confreaks.com/videos/2461-railsconf2013-what-ruby-developers-can-learn-from-go
    - Go Language talk at RailsConf 2013

  https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/360866306276327424
    - "My first major #golang service just finished 24 hours in production -  outperforms the Ruby API it replaces by at least 10:1 (in servers)" - crashlytics.com

  https://twitter.com/IvanVanderbyl/status/319002045740896256
    - "Going back to Ruby after working with Go for a week makes me appreciate a fast feedback loop. Ruby Y U SO SLOW? #golang"

  https://twitter.com/burkelibbey/status/312328030670450688
    - "#golang is quickly becoming the de facto third language of @shopify (after ruby and JS). Pretty excited about this."

  https://twitter.com/darkhelmetlive/status/142506549171073024
    "It's faster to recompile and run my #golang app from scratch than it is to restart my ruby app doing the same thing."

Brad Fitzpatrick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick

Another case for Go https://gist.github.com/ungerik/3731476

updated in my fork: https://gist.github.com/aaronblohowiak/6915539

Russ cox should be mentioned as well.