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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Go from Google...

Just a short post, since I'm actually (although you probably can't tell) rather busy today. However, I'm absolutely fascinated by Google's new language, Go. It's taken the best from just about every existing language out there, and appears so clean!

I'm currently watching Google's talk on it, while I write... I'm only a few minutes in, but it seems pretty good. Watching this seriously makes me want to start a new bio-go project... so nifty!

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7 Comments:

Blogger dawe said...

I've read about it... I'm just scared of learning another programming language.
And what about porting old applications?
I'll wait and see how spread GO becomes...

November 13, 2009 1:18:00 AM PST  
Blogger Setar said...

Very much tempted to give this a try for some toy projects first.

November 13, 2009 6:59:00 AM PST  
Blogger Anthony Fejes said...

@dawe: like any other switch, you probably shouldn't just port your code over - the best results are always going to be achieved using the "zen" of the language in question. A good way of doing something in C isn't necessarily a good way of doing it in Go.

I do agree, though, I don't think I need to jump on this immediately - after doing some more research on it, there are still a few things that are rough and would need to be cleaned up before I'd feel comfortable working with it, but I'm vastly more excited about working with Go than learning python, which was my original plan.

@Setar: probably a good plan. I'm definitely going to play with it first a bit before I go nuts and thrash my existing code base. (-;

November 13, 2009 9:23:00 AM PST  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

At the moment, Go's 6g compiler does not match others at all. It takes a long time for a compiler to get matured.

See this page:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all&box=1

November 14, 2009 8:22:00 AM PST  
Blogger Anthony Fejes said...

Yeah, and even the talk is fairly explicit that "it's not done yet", but I don't necessarily need to wait till it's the fastest before I start using it.

Ideally, I'll play with it and use it for a few small things before I undertake a big project - however, I do like the idea that it's designed for large projects... There are clear advantages to the language, as it stands, and I think the disadvantages will only become smaller.

November 14, 2009 10:02:00 AM PST  
Blogger orbitz said...

The main downsides of Go right now seem to be it's error handling and generics. Other than that it looks quite nice. I especially like the 'OO' model. Inheritance as been known to be, in general, the wrong solution for awhile and it's cool to see a language actually drop it but still shoot for OO.

November 14, 2009 9:01:00 PM PST  
Blogger orbitz said...

I saw this article today. It is sad Go still has null-references. I also did not know you can only define functions for a type in the module it is defined it, which could become a serious headache once people start trying to distribute code to each other.

http://www.starling-software.com/en/blog/my-beautiful-code/2009/11/22.the-go-language.html

November 22, 2009 7:07:00 AM PST  

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