On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Thomas Hruska <[email protected]> wrote:
> bags joni wrote:
> This is the first I've heard of it. The question I see people asking
> is, "Do we really need another programming language?"
I thought the same thing when I first read about it, but spent some
time playing around with Go the past few days. It's growing on me. Rob
Pike and Ken Thompson were instrumental in its original development.
Syntactically, it's like a high-level scripting language but it
compiles to native code (no bytecode or virtual machine), and provides
internal memory-management and garbage collection, although the
developers admit the latter is rather simple and will be improved upon
in later versions. I was surprised, though, that it still provided
pointer types that work very similar to C pointers (although pointer
arithmetic is not allowed) and they are pretty ubiquitous in the
language, especially when using composite data structures. It;s not
completely object-oriented, although provides some OO-like concepts.
It also provides an interesting implementaion of threading/coroutining
that is built into the language, as well as inter-thread communication
called "channels" which is reminiscent of IPC on Unix systems.
The real focus of Go, from what I can tell, is that it is intended to
be a system-level language rather than for user-level application
development (there're no GUI libraries available for, for instance).
It can be linked with C and C++ libraries, with some caveats (because
of the internal memory management). It's also only available on Linux
and OSX and there may or may not be a Windows port of it anytime soon.
No IDEs or anbything like either, just command-line compilers. It's
also written in C, so at the very least, one can grab the source code
and study it for educational purposes :-)
-- Brett
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"In the rhythm of music a secret is hidden;
If I were to divulge it, it would overturn the world."
-- Jelaleddin Rumi
