Google introduces new ‘Go’ programming language
November 11, 2009 – 4:28 AM
Search, mail, mobile operating systems, advertising and mapping. These are all areas in which Google plays a big part. The company is ever expanding, however, and today they’ve demonstrated that: Google has just introduced an entirely new programming language, taking influences from C++ and Python, called, quite simply, Go.
The language, which has a website here, “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++,” according to the blog post made by Google. To give you a sample of the code, courtesy of TechCrunch, here is a simple ‘Hello, World!’ program.
05 package main
07 import fmt “fmt” // Package implementing formatted I/O.
09 func main() {
10 fmt.Printf(“Hello, world; or ???????? ?????; or ????? ??n”);
11 }
The company listed its reasoning behind this language in the Go FAQ, found on the aforementioned site, which we’ve shown below:
- Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
- Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.
- There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and javascript.
- Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
- The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion.
It’s an interesting concept, and it’ll be fascinating to see if it catches on. If you need some more information, we’ve embedded a YouTube video from Google, displaying the speed of the language.
One Response to “Google introduces new ‘Go’ programming language”
Wow. The Go language packaged 120,000 Lines of source code in under 10 seconds. That’s going to increase productivity in so many fields that would embrace this over “old skool” C++ by itself or may aid in speeding up the solution scale in any hardware issues that has adapted this in many of their software applications.
By Scottsdale IT Services on Nov 17, 2009