Sorry about that. :) This does come up occasionally, but given that the gopher is the mascot animal for Go, this name has a nice ring to it once you're used to it, at least IMO.
Also reminds me of earlier days where people would talk about Go, I'd get excited and it turned out it was the board game not the programming language.
Good question. I only found out about the GopherJS project about a year after it was created, so you'd have to ask Richard for how he picked its name.
Looking at the first commit from Aug 27, 2013 [0], it was originally inside a folder "golang2js". The first mention of the rename to "gopher.js" is on Sep 18, 2013 [1]. It was also a transpiler rather than compiler originally, before it picked up more steam and started doing really sophisticated stuff to support all of Go's concurrency features.
Also, I've never heard of GoJS before today, so thanks for telling me about it! I guess I never tried to search for that term.
I'm actually quite impressed by that. I had looked into that a bit, but believed Ducktape & React to be too slow to be worth while. This is really interesting!
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[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 56.4 ms ] threadAlso reminds me of earlier days where people would talk about Go, I'd get excited and it turned out it was the board game not the programming language.
Looking at the first commit from Aug 27, 2013 [0], it was originally inside a folder "golang2js". The first mention of the rename to "gopher.js" is on Sep 18, 2013 [1]. It was also a transpiler rather than compiler originally, before it picked up more steam and started doing really sophisticated stuff to support all of Go's concurrency features.
Also, I've never heard of GoJS before today, so thanks for telling me about it! I guess I never tried to search for that term.
[0] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/2f31215a988a07bc...
[1] https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs/commit/9223c657a92578ea...
Now that I think about it, I could've made this connection sooner. There's an (awesome) set of Go packages at go4.org, and the description text says:
> ... go4, go four, gopher... get it?
As it still is for the Gopher protocol, which predates the Go language by a couple of decades.
Maybe it's because I'm a Gopher (the protocol) advocate, but this theft of the Gopher mascot by the Go community continues to irk me... :)
Probably will continue to happen as old names are reused by people who never knew the originals.
It uses the duktape JS engine in Go to render react apps server-side, with live-reload & hot-module replacement during development. Pretty cool!