In certain environments, such as for government contracting in certain countries, or for certain large corporations, or for developing safety critical applications using certain international standards, only programming languages that are officially standardized may be used. While Go would be an excellent language for such government or safety critical applications, it's acceptance is hampered due to the lack of an official standard.
While this is in essence a formality, which would entail submitting the current Go language specification with the ANSI, and then have it propagate to the ISO, I do appreciate that will take quite some time and effort. But to further the acceptance of Go language, I would propose that Google invests the necessary resources to make this happen, with support from the community to edit the standard document if needed. The standard should probably be based on Go 1, since Go 2 is still largely undecided and probably 5 years in the future. If you are worried about using Go for safety critical applications consider this: it is rare that the compiler builder gives any safety warranty, although there are some safety certified C compilers. But for similar certified Go compilers to be developed, we need an official standard first. Even if the compiler is not certified, you can still use it if you validate it yourself. This implementation of go has extensive unit tests which simplifies such validation a lot. I know of some safety critical software that is implemented in C and compiled with GCC. As a language, Go is far safer than that, and that is also why we need a standard, to be able to get away from C for some safety applications. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
