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**Brian Ketelsen:** No, that was not me. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** It was me. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Is that on Reddit? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah. Reddit has a huge thread titled [Is Go 2 actually happening? If so, when will development start?](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/65rqi6/is_go_2_actually_happening_if_so_when_will/) It's very long. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Interestingly, we just talked about that, and what it might need to include, and roughly the timeline... You were kind of saying the ten-year mark probably seems right, but it sounds like discussions would be had about what it needs to look like, and proposals and stuff like that would happen in th... |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I have a fun thought exercise for you guys... If you did a Go 2 and we remove stuff from the standard, what would remove or how much could you remove? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh, interesting. I feel like there's probably a good amount that can be removed... Probably like 30% or so, based on the things I've written and how little I use components. That's also hard, because how many people use the components that I don't use...? |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Do you need a bad SMTP client implementation? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Nope. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Nope. |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Do you need X509? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** No... We don't need Archive, we don't need Compress, we don't need Container... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I've been X509, actually... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** They don't need to be in standard library, though... They can still live somewhere else. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** My threshold for standard library inclusion is probably more like "We could get rid of 80% of what's in here, not 30%." |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** So here's the even crazier question - could you get rid of HTTP? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yes, absolutely. |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** But this is where people differ. A lot of people say that having built-in HTTP is interesting, but I think it's kind of a maintenance pain. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, and that's where the dilemma comes in, right? Because being in the standard library has its advantage because, for example, I remember starting out doing Go - it was ridiculously easy to do HTTP stuff, because I didn't have to find a library for it, or write one, or which one of the 15 is the... |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Yeah. The most interesting thing about having things in the standard library is you center the whole ecosystem around certain types. Everyone uses `time.time` and `time.duration`, or `context.now`, you know? Rather than saying, "Oh, which context package do you use?" or "Which time package do you ... |
This is why we even added DatabaseSQL originally to the standard library, because we were watching and there were like four or five databases that had totally different interfaces on GitHub, for MySQL versus SQLite, versus some Postgres... So we added it to Go 1 just to kind of unify the ecosystem to feel the same way.... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I think in answering that question you also have to think about usability, and even this listener, Chris Benson, just mentioned about marketing, how HTTP in the standard library is good marketing for Go. And before even reading that, I was thinking exactly that. One of the biggest hallmarks for G... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, I think you you have the usability side of things, but I think that people agree on things... Even, say like the Ruby world - there's a lot of common packages people use, and those are just the things the community uses, or the agreed upon thing, and they're not part of the standard library. ... |
Those things I think are needed, especially for adoption, because a lot of people - and you brought up the point too, Brad - aren't familiar with the Linux internals and how some of these signals are handled, and syscalls, and capabilities and things like that. Abstracting those away definitely helps adoption. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** One of the things we have to keep in mind is way back in my earliest Java days, you had to pick the Java framework that you were going to use. Basically, you had to pick your standard library. Was it Apache Commons, was it Java X? And if we take too much out of Go's standard library, we're going to ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think there's a lot of interesting tools coming out now though, to find packages and tooling, right? A good example, and we talk about it all the time, is -- it's escaping me... The plugin we use in Chrome... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** [Sourcegraph](https://about.sourcegraph.com/)? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Sourcegraph, yeah. That's a really interesting thing too, to find packages and see how they're used and see how many other people are using them. So is the problem really that they have to be in the standard library, or is it that we just need better ways to finding these things? |
I think the difficulty comes in maintenance though too, right? If it's in the standard library - this is kind of playing devil's advocate back the other way - we can guarantee maintenance. I remember several MySQL drivers in the early days that just got abandoned, and you're like "Okay, so which one's popular now? Let'... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I think maybe the issue of finding might not be the biggest issue. You might be able to find things, but then you have to decide which one to use, and what criteria do you even use to judge? I don't know... Just going back to the HTTP case, I'm picking on it - I can't count how many times I've se... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So what is the Go team's stance on the promotion of other libraries outside of the standard library. For instance, as a thought experiment, if these things did not exist, people would probably look to the Go team to point them towards the things they should be using. What's the Go team's stance on ... |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I mean, we don't have a policy for or against it. Mostly we stay out of it because we don't really have the time to do unsolicited code reviews around the community. We used to promote - and we still promote - the [miekg DNS library](https://github.com/miekg/dns). Whenever someone has some kind of... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think as long as there's guidance from the veterans towards things, that they should be used... I don't know how much -- I kind of wanna go through one night and just look through it and check off ones I don't think would be useful. |
It'd be cool to do a survey through the community and see what everybody agrees on. |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I don't know if you need a survey. You have the whole corpus of GitHub code, right? You can look at imports and see... We have the data in GoDoc.org, I just don't think we're using it well enough. |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's true too, yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think we should just put all the packages on an island and let them fight to see who gets to stay. \[laughter\] |
**Erik St. Martin:** Break a broomstick... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** If you don't have the skills, you're not staying. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It would be interesting to see how much of different packages are just not used at all, or used very little. That's hard to judge, too... When you think about trying to do the machine learning on that, how do you train it? Maybe some things like HTTP are just inherently used more based on the type ... |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I was horrified recently to find that a lot of people are using this package I wrote for -- I wrote a memcache client, and it was one of the first things I wrote in Go. It was kind of an exercise in writing a package, and I don't think I even ever used it myself, but I wrote a bunch of tests and I... |
\[unintelligible 01:05:48.13\] Google Cloud customer recently, and then some other Google engineers started debugging this library and filing bugs against me that this code that I basically never used was inefficient, and I was like "Crap, now I have to go maintain this thing." |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Delete it. |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** Well... But the, you know, our package management tools are kind of nonexistent or suck, and so then I would break lots of people, and I would cause even more problems. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Left-pad... |
**Erik St. Martin:** So playing along the lines of the thought experiment, rather than a standard library, what part of the language itself, the syntax, would you do away with if you could start over in Go 2? |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I recently proposed that we drop complex numbers. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Interesting. |
**Brad Fitzpatrick:** I mean, they're in there because I guess Ken really liked them, but if you survey all the code that exists anywhere - inside Google, on GitHub etc. - nobody uses them. |
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