> Unknown to most, Kubernetes was originally written in Java. If you have ever looked at the source code, or vendored a library you probably have already noticed a fair amount of factory patterns and singletons littered throughout the code base. Furthermore Kubernetes is built around various primitives referred to in the code base as “Objects”. In the Go programming language we explicitly did not ever build in a concept of an “Object”. We look at examples of this code, and explore what the code is truly attempting to do. We then take it a step further by offering idiomatic Go examples that we could refactor the pseudo object oriented Go code to.
The only real abstraction we need from Go is zero-cost serialization frameworks, which I think is an example of where having that would compromise Go’s core principles.
> Golang] Kubernetes, one of the largest codebases in Golang, has its own object-oriented type system implemented in the runtime package.
I would agree that Golang is overall a great language well-suited for solving a large class of problems. The same is true for the other languages I cited. This isn't about immutable properties of languages so much as it is about languages and problems fitting or not fitting well together.
I find it amusing that the runtime registry code is cited as an example for anything other than it’s possible to overcomplicate a problem in any language. We thought we’d need more flexibility than we needed in practice, because humans involved (myself included) couldn’t anticipate the future.
I don’t think this was ever an objective, can you clarify what you mean by “oop system” and where we implemented it?
We aggressively used composition of interfaces up to a point in the “go way”, but certainly in terms of serialization modeling (which I am heavily accountable for early decisions) we also leveraged structs as behavior-less data. Everything else was more “whatever works”.
> why? because they felt go's assumption about the problem space (that it can be modeled and solved as imperative programs)
You’d have to articulate which subsystems you feel support this statement - certainly a diverse set of individuals were able to quickly and rapidly adapt their existing mental models to Go and ship a mostly successful 1.0 MVP in about 12 months, which to me is much more of the essential principle of Go:
pragmatism and large team collaboration