They didn’t even bother to do a gradual rollout, like even small apps do.

The level of company-wide incompetence is astounding, but considering how organizations work and disregard technical people’s concerns, I’m never surprised when these things happen. It’s a social problem more than a technical one.

This is the right answer. To complement it, I’d just say I’ve read someone before say that at Microsoft there’s no incentive to squeeze performance, so why bother if it won’t help you get promoted or get a bonus? All these things add up over time to make Windows only care about it when there is actually a huge bottleneck.

It’s also worth noting (for non programmers out there) that speed has no correlation with the amount of code. Often it’s actually the opposite: things start simple and begin to grow in complexity and amount of code exactly to squeeze more optimizations for specific use-cases.

I think it’s a valid news to spread here.

You’re definitely not alone. If this happens and it becomes some major news in the community with reasonable visibility, I’m sure many people would support this.

But I’m sure the fact Android is FOSS had nothing to do with it, it’s just a random coincidence. It would simply be the most popular OS.

Problem is that requires carefully testing, and not every company wants to have a half-assed port that doesn’t have a good experience on the desktop.

Only Brazil is there because it has a big population.

You’re right that garbage collection makes Go simpler, and maybe other patterns do contribute to prevent complexity from piling up. I never worked with Go outside of silly examples to try it out, so I’m no authority about it.

What I meant was more of a “general” rule that the simpler a language is, the more code is necessary to express the same thing and then the intent can become nebulous, or the person reading might miss something. Besides, when the language doesn’t offer feature X, it becomes the programmer’s job to manage it, and it creates an extra mental load that can add pesky bugs (ex: managing null safety with extra checks, tracking pointers and bounds checking in C and so on…).

Also there are studies that show the number of bugs in a software correlate with lines of code, which can mean the software is simply doing more, but also that the more characters you have to read and write, the higher the chance of something to go wrong.

But yeah, this subject depends on too many variables and some may outweigh others.

There’s no free lunch after all. Go’s quick compilation also means the language is very simple, which means all the complexity shifts to the program’s code.

I think when it comes to tooling, some Linux tools are actually BSD software that works because of POSIX compliance. An example is OpenSSH.