In particular, if you’re going to the Google I/O conference next week and want to say hello, I’ll be at the Go programming language office hours. We’re also giving a tech talk and an introductory workshop. The Go language blog has details.
Go is a new, experimental, concurrent, garbage collected systems language. I’ve been programming in it for the last 6-9 months, and recently spoke about it at a number of universities.
“Concurrent” is one thing that distinguishes Go from other mainstream languages like C++, Java, or JavaScript. Goroutines and channels are lightweight in-process built-ins that are conceptually similar to Unix processes and pipes, and trace their roots back to Hoare’s CSP (something that students don’t seem to learn about these days). A colleague described it as programming with goroutines and channels compares to programming with threads, threadpools, mutexes and async callbacks the same way structured programming with if statements, for loops and function calls compares to spaghetti programming with goto.
Go is still a little early for prime time. The package library is still relatively thin, and there’s optimization work still to be done. But if you’re curious to learn more, there’s plenty of documentation on the Go language homepage.