I don't think it would immediately kill it. If Google abandoned Go then given it has only a few unique features it would likely fall in amongst the hundred other second-tier languages that are around today.
It is pretty inarguable that a large part of Go's success has been it's affiliation with Google.
Tons of open source projects faltered and died when they lost core contributors. The core will remain open source and available, and you might even see a few commits here and there, but that will be it.
Go for the most part is written by a small team of paid contributors -- it's not certain at all that if they went away, other people would step in their shoes.
If you took those away not to mention the message it would send to everyone would be enough to put the language in a death spiral. Good luck convincing management to use a language that even Google abandoned.
- Do all opensource projects require corporate sponsorship to be viable?
- Do Python, Ruby, even Rust have corporate backers that cannot widthdraw support?
- Does Java, being under the control of Oracle, present a better option?
- Many business are using VB, C# and F#, which Microsoft owns. F# especially could be abandoned, but it continues to find new use.
The Go code I write and compile today will continue to work for a significant period of time. If Google stopped paying the committers, this would not change - the language may not evolve, but this is a minor concern on a project of Go's popularity.
Some businesses still rely on COBOL and Fortran, but those are not exactly evolving either.
We're talking about decisions to adopt a language, so FUD and especially "uncertainty" is a very important factor to consider. This is not 1999 and Microsoft badmouthing Linux.
>Do all opensource projects require corporate sponsorship to be viable?
Not all of them, but a lot of them do. Especially languages. Even something like OCamL needs Jane Street and that french university a lot.
Go is not setup as even a 50-50 internal/external community. While the long tail is, well, long, the majority of commits and all of the steering is from Google devs.
>Do Python, Ruby, even Rust have corporate backers that cannot widthdraw support?
Rust has Mozilla and lots of paid programmers (all the core team for one). Without it, it would have gone nowhere.
Python and Ruby had had corporate sponsorship themselves too, but they have been far more organic (grass-roots) open source communities than Go from the start.
>Many business are using VB, C# and F#, which Microsoft owns. F# especially could be abandoned, but it continues to find new use.
Devs/Teams using F# are extremely few and far between compared to any established language such as C#, Java, etc. We're talking probably 2 orders of magnitude or more.
>Some businesses still rely on COBOL and Fortran, but those are not exactly evolving either.
Fortran is still evolving actually. Also Fortran and COBOL have been always mostly based on commercial compilers -- not community efforts, because that's how stuff worked back in the day.
And it's not like people write green projects in COBOL -- they just rely on it because they have huge important codebases that are 40-50 years old.
It is not FUD. It is a factor to consider, especially if you are thinking of creating mission critical software. There is no doubt that Google has plenty of form in killing projects, some of which were quite popular and/or highly visible. After all what percentage of Google income/infrastructure depends on Go? I presume it is really, really tiny and could become a casualty in corporate politics.
I personally think it is highly unlikely that Google would kill Go, but I do think one has to consider the possibility before betting the farm.
