In 2007, some of the programmers at Google looked at their options for writing software and didn’t like what they saw. They needed to manage millions of lines of code that would be constantly storing and shipping data for the world wide web. The code would juggle thousands or maybe millions of connections on networks throughout the globe. The data paths were full of challenges from race cases and concurrency.
The existing programming languages weren’t much help. They were built for games or managing desktops, or many of the other common tasks from a world before the web browser. Their rough edges and failure modes drove coders at Google crazy enough to start asking if there might be a better way. Was there something that could handle the I/O chores in just a few lines with all of the safety and security that Google needed?
