First insight into the Go programming language

4 days ago Google made their new programming language public and therefore available to the community. The language is called "Go" and is available for Linux/Mac. The current version in the repository is at best an early snapshot of the real potential of the language.

Beside the very good compiling speed, Go provides some interesting features. First of all there is the concept of interfaces. Every type that implements the methods of an interface can be assigned to a variable with the type of that interface without explicitly declaring the inheritance of the interface. Then there are channels: Channels are a way to communicate or synchronize between two or more concurrent computatios. As they are a built-in language feature, they are quite easy to use.

While the existence of interfaces might suggest that Go is a object oriented language this is only partially true. One is able to create types and define methods on those types, but there is no type hierarchy.

Hello World example: package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Println("Hello World!"); }