Why doesn’t Google use their resources to improve coding languages?
24th November 2013
My answer to Why doesn’t Google use their resources to improve coding languages? on Quora
Google invest vast resources in to language improvements, and have been doing so for over a decade now. Just off the top of my head...
- They have employed many of the Python core team (including creator Guido van Rossum) and supported their work on Python
- Their Android team wrote and support an entirely new open source JVM, called Dalvik
- They sponsored one of the creators of C to create a brand new systems programming language, Go.
- They sponsored major improvements to HTML, including the WHAT-WG which was crucial to the creation of HTML5.
- Many of their employees work full time contributing to international standards groups.
- As part of Chrome they supported the creation of V8, an astonishingly powerful JIT JavaScript implementation which sparked enormous improvements across rival engines. V8 is also the core of Node.js
- Through Google Summer of Code they financially support projects that benefit dozens of open source languages, libraries and frameworks
That’s just the stuff I can think if without doing any additional research—it’s the tip of the iceberg.
More recent articles
- The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026
- sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) - 5th July 2026