Yes, Google staffs its Go team, but the original comment invokes Google's vast wealth as though its entire market cap is available for the development of Go, which is of course absurd. Google probably spends single-digit millions of dollars on Go annually, and it seems they've determined that supporting Drew's use case would require a nontrivial share of that budget which they feel could be spent to greater effect elsewhere.

Go is not only a "side project" at Google, but one of its most trivial side projects.

Knowing that "we only have a few million in funding per year" was a valid excuse for generating abusive traffic and refusing to do anything about it, would definitely have changed a few conversations I've had working at startups. Interesting.

Of course, Google doesn't materially benefit from optimizing the module proxy for Drew's use case, and I doubt your startups would have made traffic optimization its top priority either under similar circumstances (which is to say "no ROI from traffic optimization").

Drew's use case?!

"scenario"? Pick your synonym.

They wouldn't write significant parts of their backend in a side project.

This is obviously untrue because we know that Google does write significant portions of its backend in Go and that Google derives ~0% of its revenue from Go (the very definition of a side project). My guess is that you're assuming that a side project for Google is the same as a side project for a lone developer or a small team, which is (pretty obviously, IMHO) untrue.

> that Google derives ~0% of its revenue from Go

AdWords is mainly written in Go. YoutTube is mainly written in Go. Just because they have strategic reasons for not directly monetizing Go doesn't make it a side project more than any other internal tooling.

It's core to their ability to pull in revenue now. If they were somehow immediately deprived access to Go, the company would go under. That's how you know it's not a side project.

> AdWords is mainly written in Go. YoutTube is mainly written in Go

Can you source these claims? Last I checked, YouTube was primarily written in Python, and I doubt that's changed dramatically in the intervening years given the size of YouTube. I assume there's some similar thing going on for AdWords.

> Just because they have strategic reasons for not directly monetizing Go doesn't make it a side project more than any other internal tooling.

Agreed, but all internal tooling is a side project pretty much by definition.

> It's core to their ability to pull in revenue now.

No, it's just the thing that they implemented some of their systems in. I'm a big Go fan, but they could absolutely ship software in other languages for a marginal increased operational overhead.

> If they were somehow immediately deprived access to Go, the company would go under. That's how you know it's not a side project.

I don't know what it means to be "deprived access to Go", but this is a pretty absurd definition of "side project" since it applies to just about everything Google does and a good chunk of the software Google depends on whether first party or third party (Google depends much more strongly on the Linux Kernel; that doesn't mean contributing to the Linux Kernel is Google's primary business activity). It seems you have a bizarre definition of "side project" which hinges on whether or not a business can back out of a given technology on a literal moment's notice irrespective of how likely it is that said technology becomes unavailable on that sort of timeline, and that these unusual semantics are at the root of our disagreement.

Not to mention, it's likely a quite impactful form of marketing / developer relations gain for them. I think so because when I talk to people who start to learn Go, I usually see a transfer of positive feelings and excitement from Go itself to Google as its creator/backer - one of the clearest examples of "halo effect" I've seen first-hand.

Do you really imagine some significant number of Google's search, cloud, etc customers were driven to Google over a competitor because of "good vibes" derived from Go? Google only develops Go because it's a useful internal tool, and I'm pretty sure the marketing team nor the executives spend any meeting minutes discussing Go.

Marketing works in mysterious ways.

Yes, I do imagine that people who are really into Go are more likely than average to join or start Go shops, and then pick GCP over competitors because they have to start with something, and being Go people, Google stuff comes first to mind.

Lots of companies across lots of industries spend a lot of money to achieve more-less this fuzzy, delayed-action effect.

> Yes, I do imagine that people who are really into Go are more likely than average to join or start Go shops, and then pick GCP over competitors because they have to start with something, and being Go people, Google stuff comes first to mind.

How many such people do you imagine there are? I'm active in the Go community, and I've been a cloud developer for the better part of a decade. It's never occurred to me to pick GCP over AWS because Google develops Go, nor have I ever heard anyone else espouse this temptation. I certainly can't imagine there are so many people out there for whom this is true that it recoups the cost that Google incurs developing Go.

Rather, I'm nearly certain that Google's value proposition RE Go is that developing and operating Go applications is marginally lower cost than for other languages, but that at Google's scale that "marginally lower cost" still dwarfs the cost of Google's sponsorship of the Go language.

No. It is much smaller team as far as resources go. Compared to Swift for Apple or Java for Oracle, Go is not strategic bet for Google. There is absolutely no dependency on Go to develop services for Google platform in it. Hell, large number of Google employees spend time on disparaging Go. It does not happen for other company sponsored languages.

Someone in the Go team (rsc, IIRC) commented on how a Google executive came to him in the cafeteria to congratulate him on the launch. It turns out the executive confused him with someone on the Dart or Flutter teams.

Thanks for this anecdote! This is hilarious but seems very true to me.

I just hope it wasn't Rob Pike.

Found it: Ian Lance Taylor:

https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/6dKNSN0M_kg/m/EUzc...

Now a bit of personal history. The Go project was started, by Rob, Robert, and Ken, as a bottom-up project. I joined the project some 9 months later, on my own initiative, against my manager's preference. There was no mandate or suggestion from Google management or executives that Google should develop a programming language. For many years, including well after the open source release, I doubt any Google executives had more than a vague awareness of the existence of Go (I recall a time when Google's SVP of Engineering saw some of us in the cafeteria and congratulated us on a release; this was surprising since we hadn't released anything recently, and it soon came up that he thought we were working on the Dart language, not the Go language.)