This week Google open sourced an experimental programming language called Go
Here at Google, we believe programming should be fast, productive, and most importantly, fun. That’s why we’re excited to open source an experimental new language called Go. Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.
Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.
As you might expect from people who develop lots and lots of code for a living, Go is aimed at creating a fast, safe (from a programming perspective), hassle-free development experience. And as you might expect from Google, concurrency support is baked in
Concurrency and multi-threaded programming have a reputation for difficulty. We believe the problem is due partly to complex designs such as pthreads and partly to overemphasis on low-level details such as mutexes, condition variables, and even memory barriers. Higher-level interfaces enable much simpler code, even if there are still mutexes and such under the covers.
One of the most successful models for providing high-level linguistic support for concurrency comes from Hoare’s Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP. Occam and Erlang are two well known languages that stem from CSP. Go’s concurrency primitives derive from a different part of the family tree whose main contribution is the powerful notion of channels as first class objects.
I feel like a kid on Christmas morning! I’ll have to take a look.