5 ms·
What makes Go so cool?
by LAMike 14y ago
What makes Go so cool?
- frou_dh 14y agoIt: is small, is natively compiled, has great tools, has a great stdlib, is concurrent, is parallel, is gc'd ... and has well implemented features including closures, channels and structural static typing.
- pjmlp 14y agoIt is made by Google.
- coldtea 14y agoKind of like Google Wave was cool then?
- pjmlp 14y agoYes, still waiting to see if it will follow Reader and Wave's fate.
- enneff 14y agoA nonsense comment. Go is an 100% open source project.
- pjmlp 14y agoLets see how far it goes if Google stops giving money to the core team.
- NateDad 14y ago1. Google isn't going to stop giving them money, as Go solves a ton of Google's problems with C++. 2. There are over 300 non-google contributors already http://golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS http://golang.org/CONTRIBUTORS
- coldtea 14y ago>1. Google isn't going to stop giving them money, as Go solves a ton of Google's problems with C++. So the Go team says. But Google is still using Java, C++ and Python as it's main languages. And Go wasn't especially planned by Google execs to use for "solving their problems" -- it is a grassroots project by some Google guys to solve those problems. Which is something different than a mandated to use language. >2. There are over 300 non-google contributors already The level of contribution matters a lot. If Google staffers do all the core language, runtime, compiler, tooling etc, and the rest just do little stuff here and there in the libs, add documentation, etc, then it's not like this matters much.
- voidlogic 14y ago"Go wasn't especially planned by Google execs to use for solving their problems" How do you know that is the case? I don't know the Google executive plans but it seems like to get Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson together to create a language might have/need some executive level involvement.
- coldtea 14y ago>How do you know that is the case? Because they have described it themselves (the Go guys). From the language FAQ: "Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007. Within a few days the goals had settled into a plan to do something and a fair idea of what it would be. Design continued part-time in parallel with unrelated work. By January 2008, Ken had started work on a compiler with which to explore ideas; it generated C code as its output. By mid-year the language had become a full-time project and had settled enough to attempt a production compiler." >I don't know the Google executive plans but it seems like to get Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson together to create a language might have/need some executive level involvement. The agreement to let them work on it by some exec, is different than Google deciding "we need a new language, you guys go build one that fixes our pain points, and we will migrate stuff to that". V8 or Dart for example are cases of this. Google decided the need to have those created, spend money on marketing and getting top people to work on them, built full-on documentation, marketing material, benchmarks, tools and sites for them, etc. It's the same kind of focus MS had for .NET and SUN had for Java. Whereas Go is more like how Google had a team work on Unladen Swallow, or Apple had MacRuby, etc, mostly peripheral stuff, like a 20% project that grew up.
- stefantalpalaru 14y agoFortunately it's an open source project and it will be continued long after Google loses interest in it.
- p0nce 14y agoGoogle staff upvote every article about it.
- oofabz 14y agoI am guilty of upvoting every Go post. But my work has nothing to do with Google. I just really love the language and want it to succeed. Go maps very closely to how I think about programming. It has more useful features than other languages, like channels, slices, and range. Yet despite this it is a beautifully simple language. It has fewer keywords than C and you can express the same operations with less code.
- NateDad 14y agoMe too. I'm also not a Google employee, just love the language.
- enneff 14y agoThe golang-nuts mailing list has nearly 9k members, so there is more than enough interest to justify a few dozen votes on Hacker News.