This post is about why we need a coroutine package for Go, and what it would look like. But first, what are coroutines? Every programmer today is familiar with function calls (subroutines): F calls G, which stops F and runs G. G does its work, potentially calling and waiting for other functions, and eventually returns. When G returns, G is gone and F continues running. In this pattern, only one fu

How do software developers understand which parts of their software are being used and whether they are performing as expected? The modern answer is telemetry, which means software sending data to answer those questions back to a collection server. This post is about why I believe telemetry is important for open-source projects, and what it might look like to approach telemetry in an open-source-f

This blog post is about how we added package versioning to Go, in the form of Go modules, and the reasons we made the choices we did. It is adapted and updated from a talk I gave at GopherCon Singapore in 2018. Why Versions? To start, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page, by taking a look at the ways the GOPATH-based go get breaks. Suppose we have a fresh Go installation and we want to write

How do you deploy an incompatible change to an existing package? This is the fundamental challenge, the fundamental decision, in any package management system. The answer decides the complexity of the resulting system It decides how easy or difficult package management will be to use. (It also decides how easy or difficult package management will be to implement, but the user experience is more im

For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined. My own background includes a decade of working with Google’s internal source code system, which treats software dependencies as a first-class