[LINK] Go 1

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

The Go Programming Language

 http://golang.org

"Go is an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build 
simple, reliable, and efficient software." 


http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/420021/google_going_forward_go_language

Google going forward with Go language
Paul Krill (InfoWorld) 29 March, 2012 

Google today announced version 1 of its Go language, or Go 1 for short.

Downloadable at the Go website, <http://golang.org/> the open source Go 
language has been positioned as a general-purpose language suitable for 
uses ranging from application development to systems programming and 
offering such features as garbage collection and concurrency. 

It also is intended to be easy to program.

Go 1 is the first release supporting binary distributions, which are 
available in Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. 

The language also integrates with Google's App Engine cloud platform.

"The driving motivation for Go 1 is stability for its users. People who 
write Go 1 programs can be confident that those programs will continue to 
compile and run without change, in many environments, on a time scale of 
years. Similarly, authors who write books about Go 1 can be sure that 
their examples and explanations will be helpful to readers today and into 
the future," according to a post from Go team member Andrew Gerrand on 
the Go language blog. 

http://blog.golang.org/2012/03/go-version-1-is-released.html

Google also is striving for forward compatibility; version 1 is a 
representation of Go as it is used today and is not a major redesign, 
Gerrand said. But it does introduce changes such as new types for Unicode 
characters and errors. The package hierarchy has been rearranged to group 
related items together.

"In its planning, we focused on cleaning up problems and inconsistencies 
and improving portability. There had long been many changes to Go that we 
had designed and prototyped but not released because they were backward-
incompatible. Go 1 incorporates these changes, which provide significant 
improvements to the language and libraries but sometimes introduce 
incompatibilities for old programs. Fortunately, the go fix tool can 
automate much of the work needed to bring programs up to the Go 1 
standard," Gerrand said. 

http://golang.org/cmd/go/#Run_go_tool_fix_on_packages

The Go tool suite is being structured around the go command, which is a 
program for fetching, building, installing, and maintaining Go code. This 
command eliminates the need for Makefiles to write Go code. 

Go 1 also triggers a new release of Google App Engine SDK.

In envisioning Go, Google has sought to address what it sees as a need 
for faster software development and accommodating multicore chips. 

Go is intended to enable compiling of large programs in a few seconds on 
a single computer and provide a model for software construction making 
dependency analysis easy.
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Cheers,
Stephen