C++ is a katamari ball of programming trends and half baked ideas. I get why google built golang, as they were already pretty strict about what parts of the c++ sediments you were allowed to use.
Not Google actually, but the same people from C, AWK and Unix (and 9front, which is "Unix 2.0" and it has a simpler C (no POSIX bloat there) and the compilers are basically the philosophy of Golang (cross compile from any to any arch, CSP concurrency...)
Originally Go used the Ken C compilers for Plan9. It still uses CSP. The syntax it's from Limbo/Inferno, and probably the GC came from Limbo too.
If any, Golang was created for Google by reusing a big chunk of plan9 and Inferno's design, in some cases even straightly, as it shows with the concurrency model. Or the cross-compiling suite.
A bit like MacOS X under Apple. We all know it wasn't born in a vacuum. It borrowed Mach, the NeXTStep API and the FreeBSD userland and they put the Carbon API on top for compatibility.
Before that, the classic MacOS had nothing to do with Unix, C, Objective C, NeXT or the Mach kernel.
Mac OS X is to NeXT what Go is for Alef/Inferno/Plan9 C.
As every MacOS user it's using something like NeXTStep with the Macintosh UI design for the 21th century, Go users are like using a similar, futuristic version of the Limbo/Alef programming languages with a bit of the Plan9 concurrency and automatic crosscompilation.
That's wonderful how you tied those threads together to describe Go's philosophical origins. I'm having a great time exploring the links. And the parallel with NeXTSTEP is fascinating too, I've been interested in that part of software history since learning that Tim Berners-Lee created WorldWideWeb.app on the NeXTcube.
Not just philosphical; I've read somewhere that the first Go releases in order to bootstrap themselves they bundled the plan9 forked/simplified C compilers inside. Later releases are written in Go themselves.
There is no philosophical or technical continuity. Go is really not the continuation of anything from Bell labs, not the philosophy, not the technologies, and especially not its purposes.
Go was created at Google, for Google, by Google employees. They looked at how Google was using C++ at that time, sat down, and created a new language that would suit that task more. Here's an article of what and how by Rob Pike https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/06/less-is-exponenti...
It's as much of a Google project as anything can be. "C++ is a katamari ball of programming trends and half baked ideas. I get why google built golang, as they were already pretty strict about what parts of the c++ sediments you were allowed to use." is entirely correct regarding history.
