Choosing Go to implement the new GOV.UK router

Not impressed.<p>I have nothing against Go (in fact I like it) but they seem to have built GOV.UK with every damn bit of technology there is available. I&#x27;ve seen Varnish, Go, Ruby, Python, Scala, Java, Mongo, MySQL, nginx, rails, sinatra, Django and PILES of Not Invented Here.<p>Also I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s a great use of public money to build stuff like this when they should have nginx&#x2F;apache up front and some configuration.<p>In fact this whole thing stinks of crappy information architecture resulting in a massive front end router hack that they did in Scala, binned and moved to Varnish, then binned and moved to Go.<p>This is not one &quot;cohesive&quot; web front end. It&#x27;s a rat&#x27;s nest and an increasingly expensive one.

A lot of the comments here seem to be missing something quite important: Scala and Go are not similar languages.<p>Scala is a large and complex language, encompassing multiple programming idioms. Teams programming Scala (as with C++ and many other &quot;large&quot; languages) often have difficulties nailing down what portion of the language they are going to use. &quot;Java-without-semicolons&quot; all the way through to idiomatic, functional Scala.<p>Go is a relatively small, simple language. You could easily learn Go&#x27;s basic syntax and semantics in an afternoon or two. Simplicity and suitability for programmers is an explicit design goal.<p>Switching away from Scala due to lack of experience while simultaneously picking up Go is not as illogical as everyone seems to be implying.

That seems weird to me:<p><pre><code> * No one having a deep knowledge of Scala is mentioned as a problem, but they will learn Go. * They rule out a language because of its syntax.</code></pre>

On the github page it says the router sits between nginx and varnish and does:<p><pre><code> * Reverse proxy, forwarding requests to and serving responses from multiple backend servers on a single domain. * Redirector, serving HTTP 301 and 302 redirects to new URLs. * Gone responder, serving HTTP 410 responses for resources that used to but no longer exist. </code></pre> Does anyone know why they have this as a separate piece of software instead of getting nginx to do it?

Something is wrong with this statement:<p><pre><code> &quot;Scala is great for performance, but quite bad at resource usage&quot; </code></pre> Maybe it&#x27;s directly related to the next statement:<p><pre><code> &quot;No-one in the core GOV.UK team had a deep knowledge of Scala, and particularly how the old router worked&quot; </code></pre> But the first statement, literally, does not make sense on its own.

So they are ditching Scala, because no one in the team is an expert, while replacing by a language that everyone has to learn?!?

As they are Using Nginx already interested to know if they ruled out openresty or did not consider it.

&quot;Erlang, Go, Scala, and Clojure are all good fits and represent the current state of the art.&quot; - why is the choice so limited? It seems to be quite JVM-focused as well, I would consider F#&#x2F;Nemerle as well. Erlang was invented in 1986 by the way - so a safe bet rather than &quot;state of the art&quot;.