Evergreen Go

Large organizations have hundreds or even thousands of custom systems. Many of these systems were built decades ago and codify the business as it was decades ago. Often these systems have been underinvested in for years and have become an obstacle for the organization to change.

Technology Instability

Custom systems are not typically kept up to date because as time passes, the technology on which these systems are built also goes out-of-date. Custom systems need periodic refactoring or rewriting as technology changes. Not keeping up with technology changes leads to lower developer productivity and eventually an inability to attract talent (developers want to build their CVs with the latest technologies), and vendors eventually withdraw support of the old technology, blocking developers from working on the systems at all. For example, Microsoft is requires customers with .Net Framework applications to rewrite them on .Net Core. Updating a Python 2 application to Python 3 to access new features of Python 3 involves a significant rewrite. Java versions are historically incompatible, and so on.

Upgrade Cycles

With most technologies this happens in a one-to-two-year cycle and organizations fail to plan and budget for these cycles properly. This is partially because this refactoring effort does not add new features and can be seen as a large spend for which there appears to be no benefit. Organizations that do budget for these upgrades can often end up allocating significant amounts of their IT budget just to ‘stand still’ – we have seen organizations spend 80% of their budget on ‘standing still’ leaving only 20% for new features. Often, finance teams ‘kick the can’ down the road when it comes to these large ‘standing still’ cost items leading to legacy debt problems that eventually become insurmountable. Eventually developers are unable to work on custom systems and they drift away from how the business works. Considering these systems were built to support the unique and differentiated parts of a business, these systems eventually become an anchor on the business’ ability to turn up in unique and differentiated ways in the market.

Evergreen Is Possible

The idea of evergreen code has been around for decades. The C community have been writing evergreen apps for nearly 40 years – a C program from 40 years ago will compile on a modern C compiler and run as it was designed on modern hardware. C is a systems programming language, and the C ecosystem is not suitable for modern business application development.

Evergreen Go

Go (designed by the creators of C) was designed to be a modern business programming language, and the Go team have made a commitment to backward compatibility. Go has gained wide adoption, and the tooling ecosystem is rich and meets the expectations of a modern developer. This is why Go is the only real option for building modern evergreen apps.

Using Go for frontend and backend brings go's backward compatibility commitment to the entire app. This means an app that is written today will compile in the future with no changes. Go evergreen apps should be carefully crafted to minimize direct dependencies, which means these apps have minimal supply chain issues such as obsolescence, patching, or supply chain vulnerabilities. The few dependences used in gofs apps have been stable for many years and have no transitive dependencies.