Before Go Modules and Dep there were numerous dependency managers including Glide. Glide had a lot of users and a growing following. But, when a committee of gophers decided to go in the direction that lead to Dep I was happy to have a single tool. Then when Go Modules came along I expected the single tool to continue as alternatives would be almost impossible.

By this time I expected people to be migrating from Dep to Go Modules. What I didn’t expect was the number of people still using Glide.

Glide Usage

There were some blocking bugs in Glide that pushed me to release v0.13.3 with bug fixes. When I did that I took some time to look at Glide usage. I was surprised at the amount of usage.

Here are a couple data points:

• Via brew, the macOS package manager, there were over 70,000 downloads in the past year. In that time period there was only one release. Over that time the downloads were at a consistent rate and did not go down.
• On weekdays there are more than 900 unique clones on average.

While data points like these don’t provide a comprehensive picture, they provide some insight into continued use.

Note, I do wish GitHub provided download numbers for attachments to releases.

The Future of Glide

Go Modules are planning on exiting being an experiment (a.k.a. going generally available) with Go 1.13 and Dep will be archived shortly after.

Glide hasn’t been actively worked on since Deps early days. The Glide maintainers are busy on other things.

You can see where this is going.

Unless major issues arise in modules that necessitate more tooling I would expect Glide to stay in the same state it’s in.

Thanks For All The Use

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who used Glide. It had more use than I imagined it would. It delights me that it was useful enough so many used it and continue to use it. Thanks for picking up Glide and putting it to good use.