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New Language of Computing Programming: Google Go
Google’s Go open-source programming language is slowly growing mindshare. Some are calling it a language made for the cloud. The Go language is being used in popular projects like Heroku’s Force.com, Packer.io, and Docker.
But the Go language wasn’t originally created with aspirations for the cloud. Go, or sometimes called golang, is a language that was actually designed as a more-friendly successor to the C programming language. The creators of Go are Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.
Rob Pike described some of the advantages of Go, saying that “what you’re given is a set of powerful but easy to understand, easy to use building blocks from which you can assemble—compose—a solution to your problem. It might not end up quite as fast or as sophisticated or as ideologically motivated as the solution you’d write in some of those other languages, but it’ll almost certainly be easier to write, easier to read, easier to understand, easier to maintain, and maybe safer.”
Two features that champions of the Go language frequently note are that it is statically typed and speedy.
Stephen O’Grady, RedMonk analyst, commented for an article on GigaOm that “static typing essentially means explicitly declaring everything prior to a compile. Dynamically-typed systems are much more loose, and therefore generally faster to code in. The advantages of static typing tend to be in high performance systems, because there is no decision to be made about the type at run time, or systems of substantial complexity, because looser dynamic typing can lead to difficulty in debugging errors.”
Rudi Simic at Industrie IR writes that “Go is freakishly FAST. Those stories you’ve heard about one Go server replacing 20 dynamically scripted servers for the same ported code are true.”
But acceptance of new programming languages comes slowly. Serdar Yegulal noted in an article for InfoWorld that “the promise of Go — with the speedy development of languages like JavaScript and Python and the robust power of C++ or C — is still outstripped by many of the issues that inhibit new programming languages. Those include the mutability of the language itself, the risk involved in committing to something new and untested vs. the rewards of going with what’s well-known and widely deployed; and the fact that Google’s commitment to any one project is always a toss-up.”
