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From r60 to Go 1

gophersays.com

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Re: From r60 to Go 1

#11
Anyone using or planning on using Go in the near future? For what?

It looks intriguing but I can't think of any obvious immediate applications (I'm sure there are plenty, I just don't see them).

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#12
post #11

Anyone using or planning on using Go in the near future? For what? It looks intriguing but I can't think of any obvious immediate applications (I'm sure there are plenty, I just don't see them).

Used it for my Master's thesis research. It turned out pretty well; Go hits a sweet spot between systems programming and higher-level languages. Anecdotally, it performed about 2/3 as fast as C in stress tests, which was easily worth the productivity boost (especially GC).

I chose it because the native code interface is so nice, so it's trivial to use libraries like ZeroMQ without the overhead you'd see out of something like JNI.

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#14

So to be perfectly clear, this is a project named Go but it's not Google Go? It used to be named r60? It has something to do with building things?

Go 1 is a release of the Go programming language developed at Google. The summary of http://weekly.golang.org/doc/go1.html has details.

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#15

So to be perfectly clear, this is a project named Go but it's not Google Go? It used to be named r60? It has something to do with building things?

Go 1 is a release of the Go programming language developed at Google. The summary of http://weekly.golang.org/doc/go1.html has details.

Thank you for your informative and clarifying information!

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#17
post #10
post #4

Looks like Go is cleaning up. Love the language, but I won't commit to writing heavy-duty code in it until it either has sensible union support or sensible generic support. The type system is just too weak right now.

I actually thought that to start with but when you get used to the frankly wierd type system, it actually works extremely well without generics (bear in mind I use C# which is heavily generic programming). When you approach the problems with a Go mindset, I don't think I've found a single case that needed generic types. I'm not sure of the value of unions now or ever as it brings what is effectively a compiler decisi…

Discriminated unions are neither architecture-dependent nor unsafe.

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#18
post #11

Anyone using or planning on using Go in the near future? For what? It looks intriguing but I can't think of any obvious immediate applications (I'm sure there are plenty, I just don't see them).

soon to be launch a vertical content repository, purely GO code (leveldb inspired database with fulltext, ranking and highly scalable, crawler, webserver, load balancer, etc.) with only dependency being libxml2.

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#19
post #11

Anyone using or planning on using Go in the near future? For what? It looks intriguing but I can't think of any obvious immediate applications (I'm sure there are plenty, I just don't see them).

I'm using it to build a world server for a multiplayer game. A lot of people suggest Scala/Java, Erlang, or Node.js for this, but I'm using Go. Go has a good, efficient memory model that lets me simulate a heck of a lot more of my world per megabyte of RAM. In today's world of hosting, that translates into a huge impact on how many dollars per user/hour we need to pay to run our game. That can have a direct translation into what kinds of business models can, and cannot, work for a game design. I've actually written rudimentary versions of my world server in all of the languages I mentioned above, and Go is by far the best in terms of what I can do with memory.

Go makes it very easy to communicate between nodes, almost as easy as what you can do in Erlang. Doozer is a library in Go for coordination of the activities of many machines, a lot like Zookeeper. Between Doozer and Netchan, Go is a really solid choice for making a system like a world simulator that needs to be distributed among many computers.

Go is also better than Node.js for things that require manipulating binary data. For example, I have some communications back and forth where the server is in Go, the client is in Python, and they talk using Protocol Buffers. Javascript doesn't do binary (at all? not very well?) like Go or Java can. There is an experimental protocol buffer library in Javascript, but in general Javascript needs to kind of bend over backwards to work with binary data. It's possible to do it, but it's not natural or efficient.

In general, if you care about memory usage, working with binary data, tons of simultaneous threads/actors, building distributed systems, then Go is a great choice, especially if you want to do more than one of the above.

Re: From r60 to Go 1

#20
I am excited by golang and plan to start hacking with it. Here's why:

1. language designed with good intentions (http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#What_is_the_purpose_of_the...)

2. designed and built by a group of veteran system researchers and engineers (ie. not javascript)

3. implementation open sourced from the start: http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse

4. not overdesigned (http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#Design)

5. a real and practical abstraction for multicore computing (http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf)

Its success, like most languages, will depend on library support. Here's hoping it catches on.

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