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Lately I'm thinking about which could be the tech stack that enables a project that will keep running for 10-20 years with the least amount of maintenance.

Right now it's this:

- HTML/CSS/vanilla JS for the UI. If it renders on a browser now I expect it to render almost the same in 20 years.

- SQLite: It's a library that sure will be alive, maintained and API compatible in the future.

- Go: The Go 1 compatibility promise applies here. Also, trying to reduce external dependencies as much as possible (SQLite lib should use standard DB api)

Sure you can use C or Java, but Go strikes the right balance for me (also personal preference for its philosophy and ecosystem)

It's a nice thought experiment in a time when you leave a NextJS project for a year and it ages like milk.

3 comments

The problem with Go is that it's single-source. That used to be death, single-source; couldn't get contracts if you were the only one providing a technology. C is multiple-source; even if you limit yourself to modern OSS compilers there's GCC and Clang, each from an independent group.

The trend towards unstandardized languages that only exist as a single blessed implementation, as opposed to languages defined by an official standards document with multiple implementations that are all on the same footing, is definitely an artifact of the Internet era: You don't "need" a standard if everyone can get an implementation from the same development team, for some definition of "need" I suppose.

If your horizon is only 20 years, Go is likely reasonable. Google will probably still exist and not be an Oracle subsidiary or anything similarly nasty in that period. OTOH, you might have said the same thing about staid, stable old AT&T in 1981...

Google could still exist but add Go to killedbygoogle.com

DBMS can be any of the major SQLs, and NodeJS will have a pretty small driver lib for it.

Exactly my thoughts with Nextjs. Haha So sad...