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Interviews: Ask Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan About Programming and Go
Alan Donovan is a member of Google’s Go team in New York and holds computer science degrees
from Cambridge and MIT. Since 2005, he has worked at Google on infrastructure projects and was the co-designer of its proprietary build system, Blaze. Brian Kernighan is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. He was a member of technical staff in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, where he worked on languages and tools for Unix. He is the co-author of several books, including The C Programming Language, and The Practice of Programming. Recently, the pair have co-authored a soon to be released book titled The Go Programming Language. Alan and Brian have agreed to give us some of their time to answer any questions you may have about the upcoming book, Go, and programming in general. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please keep them to one per post.
Hi, I've stopped using Go when I saw the hacky stuff I need to do to get libraries like OpenGL to behave correctly. (see https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/LockOSThread) Are there any plans to fix this?
There's already a game called Go, which has about a gazillion articles on how to program it. Couldn't you come up with a name that would be less ambiguous? Now, when you see a user group for "Go programming", you have no clue which one it is.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
Why the hell would anyone use Go?
(Serious question, since our editors didn't tell us why Go was created, what Go's intended purpose was and whether or not anyone is actually using Go.)
Why was package versioning left out? And are you guys still fond of this decision? As I use Go more and more I see this to be the weak spot; software has been around for many decades, and we all know that it is continuous evolution. Go's import system does not allow specifying or hinting a version, nor does the `go get` command (although it supports major VCSes), and that's how hacks like gopkg.in have been conceived. And it's not like package managers for other languages haven't already solved in a more or less elegant way the problem already...
Go language differs from many other languages in how it handles Errors. Can you summarize the benefits and drawbacks to the Go language error handling approach when compared to Java for large scale applications.
Is there an official cross-plattform Go IDE in the works? Experience shows that adoption is accelerated by offering a solid toolkit that is easy to pick up and get started with - such as the formidable Android Studio IDE Google offers to developers. Are there any plans similar to this for Go?
I would like to see it take the place of C++ in the development of performant end-user applications with GUIs - are there any officially sanctioned projects that aim to provide a serious GUI toolkit and stack based on Go?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca