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Comments: 831 +- Developers: Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language on Wednesday November 11, @12:21AM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Wednesday November 11, @12:21AM
from the blatently-bracist dept.
from the blatently-bracist dept.
Many readers are sending in the news about Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in:
"For example, there is a shorthand syntax for variable assignment that supports simple type inference. It also has anonymous function syntax that lets you use real closures. There are some Python-like features too, including array slices and a map type with constructor syntax that looks like Python's dictionary concept. ... One of the distinguishing characteristics of Go is its unusual type system. It eschews some typical object-oriented programming concepts such as inheritance. You can define struct types and then create methods for operating on them. You can also define interfaces, much like you can in Java. In Go, however, you don't manually specify which interface a class implements. ... Parallelism is emphasized in Go's design. The language introduces the concept of 'goroutines' which are executed concurrently. ... The language provides a 'channel' mechanism that can be used to safely pass data in and out of goroutines."
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Build-in function library (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things I immediatly noticed is the lack of build-in libraries. The reason I've always preferred Delphi and C# over C/C++ and PHP over Perl is that they all come with a comprehensive build-in function library for wide area of things.
Programming now a days tend to be mostly high-level, so you would expect that new languages would provide that. I personally hate to find tons of different libraries for C++ projects just to do a basic thing. And lets be honest, theres no sense of everyone of us to code the basic functions again (and probably in worse code than the regularly checked build-in functions)
That is why I love PHP, and because it provides a great manual on its functions. That is also why I love Delphi and why I started using it as 10 year old, without internet too - the reference guide that came with it was comprehensive and the build-in libraries and components for different things allowed me to rapidly try out to code apps and games. Only time I needed to find some libraries/components was when I was looking for a more rapid and better graphics library to do the drawing in my games.
That is what would be "fun" in a programming language. It comes a lot before "fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection."
Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's designed to be embedded, like LUA or Javascript? In that case, comprehensive libraries aren't necessary or even desirable.
Or, more likely, they just did the fun part of designing the language, and are leaving the hard part of creating libraries to somebody else.
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:4, Insightful)
They pretty much explicitly state that in TFA - the 'simple' and 'fun' stuff is done, now it's up to the [currently theoretical] community to dig in and do the hard stuff.
Of course, being Google branded and Open Source (two of the top 'auto orgasm' buttons among a huge swath of geeks) there will be, at least in the beginning, a fairly large community. I'll be very surprised if there isn't a Wiki by morning, and I'll be there's half a dozen or more Waves about it by now.
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:4, Interesting)
They also have a "spacewar" directory, currently empty...
Whenever Google announces something, you have to make the decision... jump on it immediately and get ahead of the curve, but risk wasting all that time if it doesn't take off? Or wait?
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:4, Interesting)
They also have a "spacewar" directory, currently empty...
the documentation directory is empty, but the original pdp1 code is there as well as a pdp1 emulator to run it on: http://golang.org/src/pkg/exp/spacewar/ [golang.org]
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to agree with a couple of your points, however. It's an unfortunate truth, but a heck of a lot of programmers do qualify as dicks. I've worked with my fair share of them over the years, and I have to say I've never met a truly gifted coder with a CS degree. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'll be damned if I've found one yet. Oddly, out of the "real asshole" crowd, many of them had a CS degree in addition to sucking at their jobs. The best coders I've worked with never even went to college, didn't finish, or graduated with a degree completely unrelated to computer science or IT.
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Insightful)
I've noticed a lot lately, especially here on Slashdot, that the most vocal opposition to degrees, education, certifications etc. come from people (not you in this case but it's relevant to this thread) who do not have this type of formal education in the first place.
I wonder if this says more about the US (since Slashdot is US centric) education system, the people being educated or the people not being educated. No offense, but if you've never met a competent CS graduate, you're either working in some very strange bottom-of-the-barrel outfits or with some very strange people. The CS graduates I've worked with have universally been careful, methodical and not dickish in the slightest.
Just about the only downside I've noticed is with fresh graduates who can be a little naive about business practices and real-world scenarios but they catch up far quicker than the "loner geek rebel" types whose best code at best qualify as clever but unstable and unscaleable hacks.
I'm sensing a bit of projection from the uneducated crowd, tbh.
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy, make it compile java bytecode and you probably have the biggest library around on the planet. Why a language nowadays should provide its own libraries is beyond me. That is so 90s...
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:4, Interesting)
I view this as a defect, not a feature. Without competition, bad ideas and poorly implemented libraries (see large parts of Java's IO library with its 1 billion inheritances and its slow migration from old windowing toolkits) get used because its standard, where with competition they would die and better ones would quickly be written. I prefer the C/Perl system- preferably with a site like CPAN or boost that aggregates the good ones.
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Insightful)
I still have to write destructors that clean up all the pointers to an object, and all garbage collection does is force me to call the destructor as a function, rather than a more clear 'delete' statement.
Um, no. The whole point of a GC is that you don't have to explicitely deallocate something. RAII is a problems with GCs, but you didn't mention that. As for the cache hit thing, it sounds quite suspicious to me, more details please. Also, to get that last bit of performance, you have to go low-level, that is true. Note however that explicit memory management is unnecessary in 90% of a typical application's code.
Now, since the ownership problem is passed over to the GC, things become possible that were previously hard to do. Try real closures for instance: C++0x is struggling with this, since they may extend the lifespan of a variable, which is bad if said variable was lying on the stack. Such problems simply go away with a GC. Note that C++0x rvalue references are in fact a solution to a problem caused by the explicit memory management in C++.
There is a reason many people want an opt-in GC in C++0x..
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Interesting)
BTW, I agree that > 90% of code doesn't need to run fast or memory efficiently. I am a fan of Python, but when I'm slinging around gigabytes of data, I use C. Very few programmers ever need this kind of efficiency. Anyway, check out this table half-way down [sourceforge.net]. The "DataDraw" benchmark is still in C, but it uses carefully designed memory layout. The speed improvements are 100% due to cache hit rate improvements - 15X better than when using malloc for each object. Most slow memory-intensive programs waste most of their CPU time in L2 cache misses.
You want all the fields that are accessed in inner loops to be together in memory in dense arrays, and the other stuff should be somewhere else. So, for binary tree traversal, you want left and right and maybe some key value in a small structure, and all the other bloat needs to be elsewhere. Ideally, you allocate these structures which are nearby in the tree also nearby in memory. That way, when you get an L2 cache miss, the extra data you load into the cache likely contains data that will soon be accessed in the inner loop.
Garbage collectors typically don't bother allocating objects of the same type together. Careful management of memory can be a PITA, which is one reason I use the DataDraw tool for memory-intensive applications. It allows me to "cache together" fields, and puts wrappers around data access to hide the ugliness.
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Re:Build-in function library (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you heard of TeX, the document formatting system? When you print onto 8.5x11 paper it leaves enormous margins by default. Do you know why? Because it's easier to read blocks of single-spaced text at around 60 characters per line than it is to read longer lines. The same applies to code.
Meanwhile the culture around many languages encourages programmers never to split lines. At a former workplace where we used VB, one of my co-workers worked with the IDE maximized across two screens! I always kept my lines at least under 100 characters, but when people checked in code near stuff I'd written they sometimes would go through and join my lines together.
At the same time, some of those really long lines are function calls where you don't always need to see all the arguments. Folding editors can collapse those into one line if you write them on multiple lines; it would be cool if there were anti-folding editors that could automatically break up long lines. It's similar for long formulas.
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Sponsored by Inspector Gadget (Score:5, Funny)
Lightweight languages do not remain lightweight. (Score:5, Insightful)
If this language becomes as popular as Perl, then 120,000 lines will soon become 1,200,000 lines. That is exactly what happened to the Perl interpreter and compiler.
Also, just like Java, the new Go language (due to the immense respect for Google's scientific prowess) will likely receive accolades: "it is the best, final language that we will ever need". The same was said for Java. It was sold as the ultimate final language built on 50 years of accumulated knowledge of language design and computer architecture. Upon the introduction of Java, company after company blindly adopted it.
Was Java the final language satisfying humankind's computing needs? No. Was adopting it worth the cost? Maybe.
Now, we have Go. Is it a massive improvement over C and Java, thus justifying spending milions of dollars to train programmers? Only the future will tell.
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I suppose this is Windows-only once again... (Score:5, Funny)
Can somebody call hell to see if they can host the next Winter Olympics?
Re:I suppose this is Windows-only once again... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it supports Linux and MacOS X only because the three main developers (Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer) seem to only have those two OSs between the three of them. I know Rob Pike is a Mac user and Ken Thompson loves Unix; I am guessing Robert Griesemer likes Unix as well.
Its hard to support an OS when its not your primary computing platform.
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Re:I suppose this is Windows-only once again... (Score:5, Informative)
Loves Unix? Ken Thompson [wikipedia.org] invented Unix. Along with Dennis Ritchie. In 1969.
So yeah. It would be kind of silly if he created something Windows-only...
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Re:I suppose this is Windows-only once again... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I suppose this is Windows-only once again... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no, you're getting it wrong. Ken discovered UNIX. It was there since the begining of the universe.
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Attempting to install it... (Score:5, Informative)
Not having much luck. It can't find /etc/passwd, /etc/group or /etc/hosts. All of which do exist. I'm inserting fmt.Fprintf statements to attempt to figure out why it is having problems.
A novel idea: make people learn Go by requiring them to modify it in order to install it.
Google search "Go" (Score:5, Funny)
It's a small complaint, I'm sure.. but couldn't they have given it a name that you could, you know, Google?
Re:Google search "Go" (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps we should abbreviate the "Go Programming Language" to "GPL"? That way, we can google for "GPL" and find Go code all over the place.
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Re:Google search "Go" (Score:4, Informative)
It's a small complaint, I'm sure.. but couldn't they have given it a name that you could, you know, Google?
One could do worse. There was a language called "C+@" developed at Bell Labs. It's derived from C, with classes, dynamism, and safety, much like Java. It predates Java by a few years. Try to find it.
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fmt (Score:5, Insightful)
Vowels aren't nearly as expensive as they used to be back in the day.
It'd be a nice touch if they'd add vowel support in package names.
Re:fmt (Score:5, Insightful)
People will read a piece of code more times than they will write it, so it makes sense to optimize for readability. Besides, I end up autocompleting most type/method names in the IDE anyway.
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Re:Do *not* optimize for readability (do a tradeof (Score:5, Interesting)
I find that if you shorten long words arbitrarily, it actually increases the writing time.
I could write ConnectionManager pretty quickly just due to typing experience in English. The words just flow from my brain onto the keys without even thinking about the individual letters. But if you shortened to CnnctnMgr then you have to think about it every time you type it out, what letters have I taken out again?
It gets more difficult when you're working off someone else's code. If you shorten long words but not short words then later on when you're looking at new code it takes much longer to get used to variable names. If you stick to a convention and don't shorten any words, you sometimes don't even need to see the variable being used to know what it's called, and can use them without thought.
ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException is clearly a poor joke, however. I always hated that one.
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Named after the most difficult-to-master game ever (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Named after the most difficult-to-master game e (Score:5, Funny)
version 2: Goo
version 3: Gooo
etc.
I will probably mature around the time Goooooo comes out - can't wait to use it!
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"Systems" language? (Score:5, Interesting)
They're billing Go as a "systems language." If by "system" they mean "application server in a Google data center" then I suppose that's correct. Previously the term "systems language" referred to languages suitable for operation system implementation, including device drivers, virtual memory management and other persnickety low-level software. Lack of pointer arithmetic and explicit memory management probably precludes any attempt to use Go as a "systems" language by that definition (although there are exceptions [microsoft.com] to that thinking.)
There is too much competition from other fresh and well regarded "new" languages for yet another new entrant to gain much headway without something really novel to attract attention. Not that trying is bad; by all means keep at it. Can't afford the mental bandwidth to jump on more new bandwagons, however.
Re:"Systems" language? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you don't need pointer arithmetic for a "systems language". Neither Ada nor the Modula family had it, and those languages have been run on bare machines with no other OS underneath. You need the ability to explicitly place arrays in memory as a form of privileged hardware access, but it's not something that's used in most code.
Garbage collection, though, implies there's a layer of software underneath your code. Garbage collectors either freeze the whole program, or need some help from the MMU to track pages altered while the collector is running. Hard real time and reference counts do not play well together. Reference counted systems don't inherently have that problem, and if the compiler optimizes out reference count updates they can be efficient. But most reference counted systems are slow and dumb.
It's sad to see yet another C++ alternative that can't actually replace C++. We need a C++ replacement. C++ has stagnated. C++ is the only major language to have hiding ("abstraction") without memory safety, a bad combination never tried again. Strostrup is in denial about this being a problem, and the C++ standards committee is of in template la-la land, fussing over features few care about and fewer will use correctly.
The previous poster is right, though. This is a language for writing applications to run on servers. Google needs something less painful than C++ and faster than Python. (Python is a reasonably good language held back by an archaic naive-interpreter implementation. Making Python fast is hard, though, because the compiler has to do type inference to figure out the variable type information the user isn't asked to provide. ShedSkin shows that can work, but that project only has one person on it.)
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Re:"Systems" language? (Score:4, Funny)
"Neither Ada nor the Modula family had it, and those languages have been run on bare machines with no other OS underneath"
Or customers above either.
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Re:"Systems" language? (Score:5, Insightful)
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C++ incomplete. C# windoz. Java slow elephant. (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been around for a long time.
C great language did exactly what it was designed to do. But carries a lot of burden.
C++ come on it didn't even have a string class. Thus pointer math hell.
C#, Ok it learned a lesson and found the joy of a string class. But really it's a windows only lang.
Java. Excuse me web apps that take 8Gig of ram spread across a farm of servers. This slow elephant remade the hardware business.
All of the above never really understood concurrent / multithread / parallel. ( Sorry Java devs still have issues with the concept. GC & log4j come to mind as things that forgot they were in a threaded env. )
So the "Go" lang it just might deserve a look. Clearly web centric. Clearly built for tons of concurrent comms. Recompiles in a blip thus useful for real time compiling alla jsp. I'm very performance centric. If I can replace my J2EE bloat ware with a trunk full of tiny Go apps I will.
I'm definitely watching this space for developments.
Fixes problems misguided people think C++ has. (Score:5, Insightful)
Go has garbage collection and lacks pointer arithmetic. So... it won't replace C++, then?
Why was that so easy and quick to say? I really don't understand the repeated banging-head-against-wall that language inventors are doing. There's a good reason why C++ is still in wide and very popular use: precisely because it does have explicit memory management and pointer arithmetic. C++ is a static, explicit language. Go is not. It will not replace C++, and no language will until that is understood.
The problems C++ need fixing are elsewhere. The syntax needs cleaning up. The ABI needs rationalizing between architectures. Multiple inheritance needs some taming (ditch 'virtual' multiple inheritance - it's insane), but not removing. Interface-only classes need promoting to a full type rather than inferred from being 100% pure virtual (and even then there's usually a non-pure-virtual destructor for stupid foot-bullet-avoiding reasons). There needs to be saner syntactic sugar for repeated operations (like python's 'with' keyword). Templates syntax needs to be less verbose and more automatic (already being worked on for C++0x but at this rate will be C++1x, keyword 'auto').
Stop trying to replace C++ with a language that does not fulfill every aspect C++ covers. If you ARE a language inventor and reading my comment, answer this: can you write a cache/MMU interface or an interrupt handler in your language? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board.
Re:Fixes problems misguided people think C++ has. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you ARE a language inventor and reading my comment, answer this: can you write a cache/MMU interface or an interrupt handler in your language? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board.
Because if you can't do that then you can't do anything right?
Heres a novel idea. Use a language as a tool, and use the right tool for the job. If you are writing an OS perhaps you need *explicit* access to pointers, or if you are doing something with MMU you would need a asm{} section (thats not C++ either). But when i want to write a application server then that requirement is lame and garbage collection and better memory models frees the developer and compiler (escape analysis etc) to do a lot more of the relevant work.
We are not all writing an OS, so why the hell do we all need to be using a language that can write an OS? Just like all welders are not all welding Aluminum so they don't all need fancy TiG welders (just like we don't always need to use car analogies).
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Instant Language Build-O-Matic (Score:5, Funny)
Joy, yet another programming language :-) Programming languages are personal. We all have our favorite way to do things and most of the choices are subjective preferences. At c2.com we played around with the idea of a Build-To-Order form to generate a compiler/interpreter for a language with the combination of features you ask for. Below is a rough re-creation of the form:
-----INSTANT CUSTOM LANGUAGE FORM-----
(Features in each group are mutually-exclusive if they have round brackets, but not if square brackets. )
Compile Level
* (__) Compiled: product of language targeted to direct run by a machine (possibly a virtual machine) or operating system.
* (__) Interpreted: language is processed as data by a process called an interpreter, especially in some sort of ReadEvalPrintLoop. May support a hidden JustInTimeCompilation, but that should be considered an implementation detail rather than a language detail.
* (__) Both but select on Program: language allows programs to be written for scripting or written for compilation, but programs written for compilation might not work for interpretation (e.g. due to late-binding dependencies) and programs written for interpretation might not work for compilation (e.g. due to top-level commands). This provides a lot of flexibility. However, it also partitions the user community because sharing will be difficult.
* (__) Both for any Program: language ensures that every program is suitable for both compilation and interpretation. Supporting interpretation requires abandoning a model of external linking and requires ensuring the syntax is suitable for one-pass reading (i.e. preprocessors are a bad thing). Suitability for compilation implies abandoning (or at least distinguishing) imperative commands at the toplevel: those that are to be executed at compile-time vs. those that are to be executed at runtime.
Model for Linking and Modularity
* (__) No Linking: product is always fully declared from a single page or file. No linking occurs. There is no model for modularity. Many EsotericProgrammingLanguages have this model. Support for CompileTimeResolution may provide an interesting workaround.
* (__) Includes: product may 'include' other pages, which are linked in place. There might be a system to selectively avoid duplicate includes. All pages are effectively parsed with each compile or execution.
* (__) Single Page, Modular: language semantics allow 'importing' or 'loading' of other components. Allows useful optimizations such as compilation of components... or at least preprocessing and pre-parsing, of language components, because the semantics of the 'import' are held independent of the page into which it was imported.
* (__) External Linking: a linker can combine a product by pulling multiple components together, but does so from outside the language. This model is incompatible with interpretation, and offers no real benefits over the 'Single Page, Modular' model except that it can be hacked into a language that doesn't have a concept of modularity (as was done for CeeLanguage).
Modularity and Linkage Features
* [__] Resolution of Circular Dependencies: the language or linker will correctly handle circular dependencies, ideally with minimal reliance on forward declarations.
* [__] Provisionals and Overrides: the language allows you to override global objects, values, or procedure that are declared in other modules in a manner such that those other modules use the overrides, too. Ideal form would be as though they had always used the override, but this ideal form is somewhat difficult to reconcile this feature with interpretation.
* [__] Inverted Constructs: one can automatically bui
Holy Shitbags Binaries Are Static And *Huge* (Score:5, Interesting)
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Printf("hello, world\n")
}
Size of resulting binary: 581054 bytes on x86 Linux.
Re:Holy Shitbags Binaries Are Static And *Huge* (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, so they don't have a dynamic linker yet. Consider this:
$ cat hello.c
#include
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
printf("Hello, world!");
return 0;
}
$ gcc -O2 -static hello.c
a.out is 688272 bytes (x64_64 Linux)
Until they have a dynamic linking system, who knows.
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"Go" name already taken for programming languages (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Go" name already taken for programming languag (Score:5, Funny)
Two "Go"s considered harmful.
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FYI: Array slices (Score:4, Insightful)
Array slices and mapping types have been around for decades. Not even Perl was the first to provide tham, et alone Python.
gofmt (Score:5, Funny)
From Golanf.org [golang.org] : "With Go we take an unusual approach and let the machine take care of most formatting issues. A program, gofmt, reads a Go program and emits the source in a standard style of indentation and vertical alignment, retaining and if necessary reformatting comments. [...] We use tabs for indentation and gofmt emits them by default. Use spaces only if you must."
Of course you realize ... this means war.
No exceptions? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Go seems to suffer from the problem of not being done. Case in point: exceptions.
Google's C++ style guide [googlecode.com] forbids exceptions. This is because of historical reasons - Google's codebase is not exception-tolerant.
Because Go doesn't have exceptions, programmers won't write exception-safe code. Since Go is garbage-collected, this is less of an issue compared with C++, but there are still cases where things like file handles or external resources need to be cleaned up.
Two, three, or four years down the road, it's going to be hard to use exceptions in Go, because the existing code that's out there won't inter-operate properly with code that throws exceptions.
In my opinion, exceptions are absolutely, positively critical in a modern imparative programming language. Exceptional conditions happen. Parsers get data in the wrong format. Network requests time out. Hardware fails.
There are some exceptional conditions that should never happen, and if they do they should kill the system and print something that lets you track down the problem. Exceptions provide this behavior for free; simply don't catch them and you get at least a stack trace when they occur.
The alternative is to write a bunch of error handling code to print out debugging information and exit. Then you call it from everywhere that one of these critical errors occurs.
Except, what if you want to handle one of these critical errors? What if you're calling code that exits if it fails, but you want to report errors in a different way? What if the exceptional case is supposed to happen, like if you're writing unit tests?
The other type of error isn't critical. Maybe it's a network timeout or a parsing error, neither of which should probably crash the system (in most cases). Here, you want to handle the error and take some action, like re-sending the data or asking for input from the user again.
Error codes work here, except that they're cumbersome. Want to include information on exactly what kind of a parser error occurred? Now you're going to have to return both an error code and an error string. Maybe you'll even return an error object.
What if the error occurs in a private method (lowercase first letter in Go) that's called by the public method (uppercase first letter in Go)? With exceptions, you just throw in the private method. With error codes, you need to check for an error code in the public method when you call the private method, then pass the error along.
What has the world come to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ken Thompson, who invented Unix, creates an experimental new language with Rob Pike et. al. and Slashdotters try to overdo each other in pissing all over it.
Nice.
Tell you what kids, try learning something for a change. And show some respect.
Re:Wonder? (Score:4, Informative)
Does Go have goto statement ?
why wonder when you can look it up? http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html [golang.org]
tl;dr yes, it has goto
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Re:Maybe C really is "it" for now... (Score:4, Informative)
Because enforcing strict rules about indenting and how it's interpreted is more oppressive and error-prone than using brackets? I agree with your FIRST paragraph...
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Re:Not actually safe (Score:5, Funny)
You're pretty bold giving MS any credit here. This is the home of the Google fanboi, for reasons I don't understand other than some people hope Google will take down Microsoft.
I'm an AC because of companies like google.
The most common five reasons for AC posting:
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You must have missed the Go specification... (Score:5, Insightful)
C++'s templates offer a lot more than just generics (which is what you're talking about when you say "type safe containers and reusable algorithms"), however Go does, in fact, provide for this with its "interfaces." The Go interface affords for both data abstraction (akin to C++'s inheritance hierarchy), and generic programming. Go provides an "Any" container, which "may be used to implement generic programming similar to templates in C++ [golang.org]".
It's worth noting though that this is a dynamically bound language feature, which means it is checked and enforced at runtime rather than compile time -- both a positive and a negative depending on how you look at it. It provides for some more interesting programs to be written that do fun things at runtime, but on the down side it means you lose a lot of the compile time type-checking that C++ provides and can save a lot of debugging time later on. It also means that you can't do any template metaprogramming with Go -- again which can be viewed as a positive or a negative.
I also challenge you to come up with a solution that equates to Go's built in Channel's in less than 100 lines of C++. What you're actually saying is you "can implement Go's Goroutine's AND Channels in less than 100 lines of code in portable, cross platform, C++". But, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you've already go some mechanism for emulating a Goroutine (which by the way allows one to "mutiplex independently executing functions onto a set of threads"). I think _just_ the thread safe code that would implement all the necessary locks and barriers for a _single_ platform would probably be more than 100 lines, and would not be portable (ie, it would be pthreads, or win32 specific).
I am open to being wrong about that, but I really do believe that you haven't spent much time investigating Go, and are therefore spreading FUD. For example your assertion that "in Go, a List class would have to use void* types, throwing type safety out of the window" is just plain wrong.
I should also point out that I am in no way a Google Go fanboy. I see it as a pseudo-interesting low-ish level language that I haven't quite been able to envision the proper use for yet. I don't really buy Google's claim that it's a system level language (I can't see myself wanting to write an OS or device driver in it). To me it seems more like a great way to rapidly build efficient client / server type applications.
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