The Go Programming Language

New systems level programming language from Google (but, judging from the copyright statements, not an official Google project). Go has built-in garbage collection, a simpler syntax than Java or C++, fast compilation times and excellent performance — and it was designed with concurrency in mind. Interesting and ambitious, to say the least.

Among many interesting details, it ships with a utility named gofmt, which formats Go source code according to a standardized style — which standardized style uses tabs, not spaces (hooray). Go uses a Pascal-style “:=” assignment operator for initializing values (hooray). And, regarding my own tiny sliver of expertise, the Regexp library offers only a crude regular expression syntax (boo).

Update: Some amazing names are behind Go, including Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.

★ Tuesday, 10 November 2009