For me this is the last nail in the coffin for #Go.
I've never bought much into the language. I've been impressed by its constructs to natively manage and synchronize asynchronous operations, but its rigidity when it comes to programming paradigms (no proper object-oriented and functional constructs in the 21st century, seriously?) means that I see it as a language that seriously limits expressivity, and doomed to generate a lot of boilerplate. It's a language very good at solving the types of problem that are usually solved at Google (build and scale large services that process a lot of stuff in a way that the code looks the same for all the employees), and little more than that.
After #Rust really took off, I didn't see a single reason why someone would pick Go.
And now here we go with the last straw: Google has proposed to embed telemetry collection *into the language toolchain itself*. And, according to Google, it should be enabled by default (opt-out rather than opt-in), because, of course, if they make it an opt-in then not many people will explicitly enable a toggle that shares their source code and their usage of the compiler with one of today's biggest stalkers. If they make it an opt-out, well, many people won't even notice, and you can grab more data points from people, whether they know/like it or not.
If you build open-source projects in Go, it's time to drop it and start considering alternatives. The market for modern compiled language is much more competitive now than it was a decade ago. We knew already that we couldn't trust a programming language developed by the largest surveillance company on the planet.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/10/googles_go_programming_language_telemetry_debate/
@blacklight A lot of great TUI apps I use daily are in Go: amfora, gomuks, tut… These make me resort to heavier GUI (or even web) ones less often. It'll take a while to find or even create the alternatives. And it's not that I think Go is a bad language — I like it, actually I think Pike did a good job designing it, but its connection to Google always bugged me. Go is among the few "Google things" I find acceptable to use, I even have HTTP/2 and WebP disabled in Firefox 😞
@blacklight I hope gcc-go will pick the ball and will be brought up to speed to match the language spec of what we have in the reference toolchain as more developers would be moving away from the reference one to gcc-go.