[openstack-dev] [tc] supporting Go

Ben Swartzlander ben at swartzlander.org
Mon May 9 18:35:27 UTC 2016


On 05/09/2016 02:15 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> Excerpts from Pete Zaitcev's message of 2016-05-09 08:52:16 -0700:
>> On Mon, 9 May 2016 09:06:02 -0400
>> Rayson Ho <raysonlogin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Since the Go toolchain is pretty self-contained, most people just follow
>>> the official instructions to get it installed... by a one-step:
>>>
>>> # tar -C /usr/local -xzf go$VERSION.$OS-$ARCH.tar.gz
>>
>> I'm pretty certain the humanity has moved on from this sort of thing.
>> Nowadays "most people" use packaged language runtimes that come with
>> the Linux they're running.
>>
>
> Perhaps for mature languages. But go is still finding its way, and that
> usually involves rapid changes that are needed faster than the multi-year
> cycle Linux distributions offer.

This statement right here would be the nail in the coffin of this idea 
if I were deciding. As a community we should not be building software 
based on unstable platforms and languages.

I have nothing against golang in particular but I strongly believe that 
mixing 2 languages within a project is always the wrong decision, and 
doubly so if one of those languages is a niche language. The reason is 
simple: it's hard enough to find programmers who are competent in one 
language -- finding programmers who know both languages well will be 
nearly impossible. You'll end up with core reviewers who can't review 
half of the code and developers who can only fix bugs in half the code.

If you want to write code in a language that's not Python, go start 
another project. Don't call it OpenStack. If it ends up being a better 
implementation than the reference OpenStack Swift implementation, it 
will win anyways and perhaps Swift will start to look more like the rest 
of the projects in OpenStack with a standardized API and multiple 
plugable implementations.

-Ben Swartzlander

> Also worth noting, is that go is not a "language runtime" but a compiler
> (that happens to statically link in a runtime to the binaries it
> produces...).
>
> The point here though, is that the versions of Python that OpenStack
> has traditionally supported have been directly tied to what the Linux
> distributions carry in their repositories (case in point, Python 2.6
> was dropped from most things as soon as RHEL7 was available with Python
> 2.7). With Go, there might need to be similar restrictions.
>
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