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Five Years of the Go Programming Language

Posted by timothy on from the going-strong dept.

omar.sahal writes Go celebrates five years of its existence with this blog post recapping a little history, future and some philosophy. "Five years ago we launched the Go project. It seems like only yesterday that we were preparing the initial public release: our website was a lovely shade of yellow, we were calling Go a 'systems language,' and you had to terminate statements with a semicolon and write Makefiles to build your code. We had no idea how Go would be received. Would people share our vision and goals? Would people find Go useful?" The Go programming language has grown to find its own niche in the cloud computing word, having been used to code Docker and the Kubernetes projects. The developers also announced details of further projects to be released, such as a new low-latency garbage collector and support for running Go on mobile devices.

6 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. For those interested... by Dimwit · · Score: 4, Informative

    Go was developed in large part by Rob Pike who has a long history of concucrrency programming going back to Plan 9 from Bell Labs and earlier.

    Some of his more interesting papers about concurrency are:

    http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/n... (The Newsqueak Programming Language)
    http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/n... (Newsqueak Implementation)
    https://www.usenix.org/legacy/... (A Concurrent Window System)

    You can even see some hints of what was to come in his paper outlining the design of the Blit terminal for Unix:
    http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs...

    --
    ...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
    1. Re:For those interested... by TheCarp · · Score: 4, Informative

      Interesting. I have been kicking around go on one of my side projects for a while now and I have come to REALLY LIKE the language. I never thought I would be happy to see typed variables again, but now, I like it so much, I get a bit annoyed at languages that don't have typed variables.

      It doesn't surprise me that the lead developer has so much history, because the language feels like someone said "Ok what have we learned since C came out" and then reverted all the way back to there and built something new and clean from the lessons learned.

      It reminds me a lot of the perl philosophy of "make it easy to do common things", no more fumbling around with memory allocation, it doesn't entirely do it for you, but it provides a very clean interface that makes sense for allocating what you need when you need it.

      --
      "I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
    2. Re:For those interested... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The language itself is basically Oberon, with concurrency from Occam, all with a thin coat of C syntax to make it seem more familiar. The runtime library is very different from Oberon though. And the language is moderately more complicated than Oberon, though maybe not - they added Occam/CSP to the language ,but deleted the wacky and nearly useless bitset support, so it may be a wash in the end.

      I'm a big fan of Modula-2 and its successor Oberon and always though it was a major tragedy that they were ignored in favor of C, C++, and Java, so seeing some of the original guys that inflicted C on the world finally recognize the brilliance of Oberon it and push it this way has been extremely encouraging.

      I can remember doing concurrent programming in 1985 on my Apple-2 in UCSD Modula-2. I'm kind of surprised Modula-2 hasn't seen a renaissance for use with the little Arduino boards, Modula-2 has language-level support for doing things like interrupt handlers and memory-mapped I/O.

    3. Re:For those interested... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 3, Informative

      Due to the inherent design of C/C++ header files and their "compile units", building any large project in C++ takes almost forever. The work to build grows significantly more than linearly with the number of source files.

      Many things in C++ feel very "brittle" largely due to the limitations of its type system and generics.

      C++ reference counting is better than fully manual memory management, but still often requires careful attention to "ownership" issues, leaving a risk of leaks or segfaults.

      Most recommedations from the experts advise against using most of the actual features of C++ because they are so poorly conceived, poorly supported, or cause safety or compatibility problems. Best to stick with a bare-bones subset that's not very satisfying.

      Many of these problems were addressed by languages such as Java and C#. However those both require a heavyweght "virtual machine" runtime. The nice thing about Go is that it creates self-contained executables that run without needing to install anything special on the target machines (at the cost of the executables being larger than most people are used to).

  2. Re:So no one has used it yet? by chuckymonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    It says right in the summary. Docker is one of them. Here's a few others: Doozer(Heroku) DropBox backend services CloudFlare SoundCloud BBC uses it pretty extensively etc....etc

    --
    "Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
  3. Re:So no one has used it yet? by Ian+Lance+Taylor · · Score: 3, Informative

    Docker was the obvious suggestion, since it's right there in the article.

    Here is a list of some projects written in Go: http://code.google.com/p/go-wi... . A few are Google projects. Most are not.

    > Could someone have written Docker in other languages just as easily?

    I don't know, you'll have to ask the Docker authors. You could start at http://www.slideshare.net/jpet... .