Comment by shykes
9 hours ago
The article's point that Go is a bad fit for some of the low-level interactions with the kernel, is absolutely correct though. We had to do a lot of juggling to get it to work properly. But in the end it was fine. I would say it was the correct choice of language at the time, and it certainly contributed to Docker's early success.
Another explicit goal was to facilitate contribution. We thought Go syntax was "vanilla" enough to attract a broader set of contributors than a more niche, opinionated language like Erlang, Haskell, Clojure etc. I think that also worked out well - Docker was known for attracting many contributors, many of them making their very first open source contributions. We even ran special meetups to help people become contributors, that was fun.
I think that's so true and it was one of the keys to success of the project. I contributed the very first simplistic implementation of referencing linked containers by name. I never would have bothered if the project was written in C or C++ (I'm more than capable, I just don't enjoy torturing myself). Go made it MUCH easier for a fly-by-night contributor such as myself to join the party.
This is the coolest set of contributions to HN this month, most likely.
Thank you.