Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Go: New Open Source Language from Google

Last night I read a news from CNET news about a new language as an experiment and promising language targeting today's computer trend with multi-processors: Google hopes to remake programming with Go. Then I went to Google Go language site: golang.org. I watched two shows there. One is an introduction about Go, last about one hour, and another promotion show in about 2 minutes. Here is the introduction show on YouTube:


Show link: The Go Programming Language

It is very impressive. I really like it even I did understand all the codes in their new syntax. The codes look very similar as C/C++ and some like C# or Java, however, many new features are introduced to Go. The team behind Go is a group of very talent people who were the original creator of UNIX and Chrome's Javascript and compiler. As it is mentioned at Go's web page: Go is ...simple, ...fast, ...safe, ...concurrent, ...fun, and ...open source.

I am very impressed with its compiler result, 13k lines of codes compiled within 209 nanoseconds and whole math and other calculation libraries compiled in about 9 seconds. The current version is only available for Linux and Mac OS.

It looks that Go will have great feature. Comparing to the current computer languages, Go's great performance will be very attractive to programers. It is built from ground up with clean design. I guess the future Google OS may be based on Go and more great applications written by Go will be coming out soon. Still as Rob pike said in the show, (Go) is early yet ... more will be coming soon.

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