Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language

Many readers are sending in the news about Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in: "For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference. It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures. There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python's dictionary concept. ... One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system. It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance. You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them. You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java. In Go, however, you don't manually specify which interface a class implements. ... Parallelism is emphasized in Go's design. The language introduces the concept of 'goroutines' which are executed concurrently. ... The language provides a 'channel' mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines."

Comments

Re:gofmt

[fnj]

Good find. OMFG, only a retard uses tabs. JC. Insanity.

Re:Build-in function library

[Raffaello]

You don't need an IDE, just a decent editor that can do autocompletion. These sorts of editors have been widespread since the 1980s.

A better reason for shorter names, and one I still heard seriously argued less than a decade ago, was the relatively narrow, 80 character screen width. Long names can eat this up fast, especially if your function bodies contain nested, indented blocks.

However, we now live in an era where 80 character screens are unlikely to be a limit to working programmers, though, as I said, I've heard it argued that sticking to this 80 column limit allows multiple, side by side program text windows on a single monitor, and so should continue to be standard.

Re:What has the world come to...

[lennier]

"Ken Thompson, who invented Unix..."

Yes... about that.... the problem is, Unix isn't exactly the best designed OS of all time. It's there, and it runs, but it's not necessarily pretty.

It survived, like C, so that says something... but mostly about how abysmally awful all the other alternatives have been.

Go looks like a small step forward, in some ways, but... sigh. Better, but so little better.