Programming with Go

Modern Classic

Article from ADMIN 11/2012

By Oliver Frommel

The programming language Go promises long-term compatibility with the recently released Version 1. Designed for system programming, it does without trendy features and is therefore interesting for anyone allergic to hype.

Go makes no false promises. Perhaps that is exactly what makes the language so interesting in the long term. In 2007, Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike invented Go because they were unhappy with the existing languages for system programming. They do not pander to any of the current trends like asynchronous web programming or cloud computing; instead, they have learned from 30 years of experience with C and created a programming language capable of becoming its successor.

Like C, Go [1] shows its strengths in system programming, although the language can be deployed for almost any purpose. The language inventors are employed by Google, and Go has made its way onto the Google App Engine just like Java and Python; however, support for Go is currently in the experimental stage [2].

Future Promise

Early in 2008, Thompson completed his first experimental compiler, which generates C code. Ian Taylor started a little later with work on a Go front end for the GCC compiler. Toward the end of the year, Russ Cox joined the Go project, and the work went forward a little faster. In November 2009, the team finally presented the first public release of the Go compiler. In March 2012, version 1.0 of the compiler and the specification were released, promising compatibility with future Go releases [3]. Go is thus suitable right now for genuine software projects, not just experiments.

The declared goals of the Go project are efficient compilation, fast execution, and simple programming. Existing languages fail to combine all three, say the Go inventors. Go sets out to combine the simple programming offered by increasingly popular languages such as Python and Ruby with the efficiency and reliability of languages such as C, C++, and

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