The Importance of Telemetry in Open Source

In this episode, we speak with Russ Cox, distinguished engineer and Go programming language tech lead at Google. We discuss the original motivations for Go, the principles behind the language design, what other projects can learn from how Go manages its open-source community, and what Russ would change about Go if he started again. Russ also talks about the telemetry proposal, the involvement of Google in this, and what the Go team learned from a previous alias proposal.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

• PlanetScale
• "Rust vs. Go: Why They’re Better Together"
• Proposing Changes to Go
• GopherCon
• "The Go Programming Language and Environment"
• "Surviving Software Dependencies"
• Dick Sites
• Understanding Software Dynamics
• “Stanford Seminar - Making the Invisible Visible: Observing Complex Software Dynamics”
• MacBook Pro
• Mac mini
• ThinkPad X1 with Linux
• “A Tour of the Acme Editor”
• The Web is a Customer Service Medium

ABOUT RUSS COX.

Russ Cox has been working on the programming language Go at Google since 2008 and is currently the Go project lead. He joined Google directly after completing his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. From the early days of Go when he was part of a small team, he has played a significant role in the development and success of the programming language.
 

Highlights:

[Russ Cox]: All the Go code in the world was in one source repository, which meant that if we did want to make some sort of major change to the way things looked or even sometimes the way things worked, we knew where all the code was that had to be updated. There were a couple of times when we were going to change something syntactically, and we thought we knew what it was going to be and how to implement it, and we said, “Well, let's go see what it looks like.” We’d get everyone to just sort of crowd around one computer, usually mine. I'd open up an editor and open up literally every single file, Go source file, in the world, then just do some global search and replace kind of things in the editor. They'd watch the files changing on the screen, and everyone would be like, “Oh, yes. That looks good.” We read it all out and [would] go back to our desks.

— [0:06:49 - 0:07:28]

[Russ Cox]: We just discovered that for the last six releases, we had this kind of bug where you couldn't actually build a Go program without an Xcode installed, totally unintended, and no one noticed. If we had any sort of telemetry or tracking of what is the build cache hit rate on things like the standard library? — Which is a continual thing that we actually do run into problems with. — What’s the hit rate on the build cache? If we knew that when we looked at how it was going and then after a new release came out, and all of a sudden, it was much closer to 0 than 100, all of a sudden, you would say, “Oh, I wonder why,” and you would look into that. But without that kind of visibility, we just can't. So telemetry really is about how do we get the information that makes us better as software developers.

— [0:28:43 - 0:29:25]

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