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By checking the github activity, geth seems to fall behind eth. Would love to hear about it's future and maybe something about the why's (likely to be related because it's in golang).

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Ahm, you're looking at the stable branch, that's being frozen for Homestead. Check out the develop branch, we're pushing in commits almost every day.

Edit: Further, the Go team switched over to a much stricter development methodology to prevent any major issues from getting into the main codebase:

  • Every pull request needs review by at least two team members
  • Most of the pull requests are squashed into a single huge commit. This is based on Google's development model and has the advantage that you can easily track features and you can check out the code almost at any commit and have a stable program. This however results in GitHub reporting only a few commits, whereas there are literally 10-20 within any single PR.

Lastly, over the last two months we revamped the entire RPC layer, we enabled adnroid/ios libraries, the light client is almost ready, state trie pruning is also almost ready.

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    Just to give a recent example, the RPC update PR is a single commit github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/pull/2140, consisting of 11.000+ lines of modified code that took 2+ months to write. If you look through the non-merged closed PRs you'll find a dozen iteration of this code, each containing tons of commits, but only a single squashed version is counted by GitHub. Feb 4, 2016 at 15:58
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    Not to mention the constant rebasing, squashing of the commits and commits being reworked / rewritten.
    – Jeffrey W.
    Feb 4, 2016 at 15:59
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geth is currently the most stable and most dedicated client available for Ethereum. If you notice a certain drop in development, there might be two reasons for it:

  1. the Ethereum foundation is running out of money and needs to cut down the core developer teams.
  2. the geth node implementation might run stable and is close to feature-completion and therefore other targets like mist get more love.

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