Comments on: GO: Google Launches its own Programming Language

By: Hassan Azhar

Hassan Azhar — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 11:51:42 +0000

Hi, need answer for one question please. Does this language support development of web application?

By: vitamin e

vitamin e — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:28:44 +0000

Google’s Go Programming Language (golang.org) Go is a compiled, concurrent programming language. The syntax of Go is close to that of C except for the type declarations. The language supports include: garbage collection. The concurrency model of Go is modeled after Tony Hoare’s CSP. Missing features include: exception, type inheritance, overriding of methods. Unlike Java or C++, maps are built-in like strings. It is open source, fast , speedy, best for web scripting.

By: Giorgio Malagutti

Giorgio Malagutti — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:14:25 +0000

@Dean: running on a VM decouples you from the OS. If Go will run only on Chrome OS it will be probably only be adopted at Google. Of course you can write the OS in Go, but probably adopting Linux for the most part will save you a ton of work. Chrome OS will be out this week, soon all our questions will be answered.
@Priya: when it comes to web development probably the frameworks counts more than the language: Rails, Django, Wicket, Struts, ASP.NET, MVC, … (too many to list) are all based on languages that were not strictly meant for web development.

By: Dean Schulze

Dean Schulze — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:42:59 +0000

@Georgio: I know what Erlang is and what it is capable of. Why would you write a system programming language in a language that runs on a VM? If you wrote a new O/S with GO what would you run that new O/S on – an erl instance that is running on an underlying O/S?

I didn’t see anything in GO about running on a VM. It produces native binaries.

By: Giorgio Malagutti

Giorgio Malagutti — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:13:24 +0000

@Dean: Erlang runs on Windows and Linux. See how Linux can control a Vista PC: http://www.erlang.org/examples/win95demo/win95demo.html . What is interesting in Erlang is that it does not rely on the threading model offered by the OS and uses its own light threading system where variables cannot be reassigned (they are indeed constants). As a result you can afford to run millions of threads in parallel and since there are no shared variables (only shared constants) Erlang you eliminate the risk introduced by shared memory across threads, so I would say that Erlang favors robustness. Facebook uses Erlang for its chat service, handling more than 100 million active users. Erlang is being used also by Amazon, Yahoo, Motorola, T-Mobile, Ericsson http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1636455/where-is-erlang-used-and-why. So my answer is: Erlang takes control of what is needed to run fast, robust applications but for all the other services it can delegate to the existing OS it is running on.
@ Priya: of course the language is not strictly meant for web development, but neither was Java or C# or Ruby. I assume that developers at Google will soon create frameworks like Django, Rails, Wicket, (…) to simplify writing web applications. The added value of Go in my opinion remains the fact that this language is designed from scratch to favor scalability. Scalability is interesting for desktop applications on multicore computers, but the place where scalability really makes the difference is with web applications where a startup can go from 100 users to a million users in 30 days. You need to be able to handle that, and with Go I expect it to be easier than with Java or C#, not to mention Python. So maybe Go is not better than C# or Java or Scala from the developers standpoint but probably it is from the standpoint of the guys running Google App Engine.

By: Priya

Priya — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:51:19 +0000

@Nick I agree, The compile time doesnt really matter much. We would like to see some concrete stats on performance. May be its a good language for scientists.

@Giorgio I dont think this anywhere remotely looks like a web dev language. What do you say?

By: Bryan Headley

Bryan Headley — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:54:25 +0000

Are the compile times better than your standard C/C++ compiler, e.g., cl or gcc?

Real question with this is, does it hit the sweet spot better than Digital Mars’ D?

By: Nick George

Nick George — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:15:54 +0000

I don’t understand why everyone is so excited over this. The compile times are not that great. I can compile a C# app with similar characteristics in about the same time, if not less (depending on the computer).

I don’t think this will go anywhere fast soon.

By: Dean Schulze

Dean Schulze — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:10:28 +0000

Giorgio – A systems level programming language that runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine? What O/S would the VM run on?

GO is an alternative to C++ to do things like write an O/S, not a VM based language for writing enterprise applications.

By: Viral Patel

Viral Patel — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:16:32 +0000

@Giorgio: I agree with you that Google does have resources to create a new language. More important is to make it robust and for that Google have their massive infrastructure that they can utilize. One things I want to see if how much does this language became user friendly/popular.