Apparently an unmaintained C++ app using deprecated libraries and making false assumptions about Google's internal architecture was able to handle it too, albeit with poor performance. So I disagree that this move says anything about Go's capabilities, positive or negative.

I'm inclined to agree that by itself, this doesn't say much about Go at all.

That said, I'm not sure how much a non-open-source program can really do in terms of marketing Go or any other language. This isn't so much politics as logistics: you need to be able to see the difference in code to get a sense of the advantages or disadvantages of one language over another, and if the program isn't open-source you can't do that. The author can say it's "more readable" (and does, in fact), but that's not something that can be quantified, and so there's really nothing but one guy's opinion to go on.

Find me 1% of people who have seen Go call it less readable than actual C++ code in the wild, and I would agree that readability is debatable.

Go has an open source compiler, tool chain, and standard library, only this top-layer app is the non open source part of the stack.

Yeah, but the top-layer app is where the author's statements would bear out: that's the code directly comparable to the old C++ code that it replaced. It's not really practical to give examples of that when you can't open-source the app; you could maybe do a few trivial snippets or put it all behind a big thick NDA, but neither method works very well.

At least it says that Go works for replacing legacy apps that are using deprecated libraries and making false assumptions. There are tons upon tons of such programs in the world.

Agreed. I wonder why dl was written in C++ in the first place. Web stuff is not a natural place for C++.

(And I say this as a C++ fan -- relatively)

Before Go, wasn't all user-facing stuff in Google written in C++ for performance?

I think a Google guy once said mostly C++ and Java.

It doesn't necessarily hold. You can write a system which handles huge volumes of traffic simply by scaling horizontally with N servers. For some languages N is just a lot larger. Unless your startup has unlimited hardware resources like Google you can't make that assumption.