Problems with Go channels (2016)

When I did my 20% on Go at Google, about 10 years ago, we already had a semi-formal rule that channels must not appear in exported function signatures. It turns out that using CSP in any large, complex codebase is asking for trouble, and that this is true even about projects where members of the core Go team did the CSP.

If you take enough steps back and really think about it, the only synchronization primitive that exists is a futex (and maybe atomics). Everything else is an abstraction of some kind. If you're really determined, you can build anything out of anything. That doesn't mean it's always a good idea.

Looking back, I'd say channels are far superior to condition variables as a synchronized cross-thread communication mechanism - when I use them these days, it's mostly for that. Locks (mutexes) are really performant and easy to understand and generally better for mutual exclusion. (It's in the name!)

What is "20% on Go"? What is it 20% of?

At least historically, google engineers had 20% of their time to spend on projects not related to their core role

This still exists today. For example, I am on the payments team but I have a 20% project working on protobuf. I had to get formal approval from my management chain and someone on the protobuf team. And it is tracked as part of my performance reviews. They just want to make sure I'm not building something useless that nobody wants and that I'm not just wasting the company's time.

I never worked at Google (or any other large corp for that matter), but this sounds like the exact opposite of an environment that spawned GMail.

As you think back even to the very early days of computing, you'll find individuals or small teams like Grace Hopper, the Unix gang, PARC, etc that managed to change history by "building something useless". Granted, throughout history that happened less than 1% of the time, but it will never happen if you never try.

Maybe Google no longer has any space for innovation.