• See golang.org for language documentation
• W/in a factor of 2 slower than C/C++. Generally w/in 20% speed of c/c++ programs
• Intrinsically safe
• This talk has been presented before, so the slides may be online. see google io 2010 archive
• check out article in Register about Go that quotes Odersky: “I like a lot of the design decisions they made in the language … Basically, I like all of them.”
• built on 4 self-reinforcing principles: simple, ortho, succinct, safe
• see axiom of choice in type theory
• public/private hint in variable name is one of the best things about the language
• see CSP tradition
• uses a deterministic model, channels, for concurrency
• the “go” keyword launches a go routine
• “for { … ” declares an infinite loop
• expressiveness comes from orthogonal composition of constructs
• Go conceived while waiting for 45 min gcc compilation
• Go app engine sdk is a complete installation vs building from source

Questions

How is the language intrinsically safe?

• no stack overflows

Interoperability?

• native swig support for C/C++ progs
• no java interop

Exceptions?

• no try/catch
• uses panic/recover
• function-level, not statement-level

Channel implementation?

• not like erlang channels
• passing channel over netchan is coming

Generics?

• Core team has members that believe generics must and must-not be included

Upgrading?

• gofix rewrites code
• gofont pretty-prints/formats code

Inspirations?

• Oberon
• New Squeek
• Didn’t cherry-pick features to build an ideal language, but they did include elements that helped them be productive