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Google Programming

Interviews: Ask Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan About Programming and Go 185

Alan Donovan is a member of Google’s Go team in New York and holds computer science degrees from Cambridge and MIT. Since 2005, he has worked at Google on infrastructure projects and was the co-designer of its proprietary build system, Blaze. Brian Kernighan is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. He was a member of technical staff in the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Labs, where he worked on languages and tools for Unix. He is the co-author of several books, including The C Programming Language, and The Practice of Programming. Recently, the pair have co-authored a soon to be released book titled The Go Programming Language. Alan and Brian have agreed to give us some of their time to answer any questions you may have about the upcoming book, Go, and programming in general. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please keep them to one per post.
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Interviews: Ask Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan About Programming and Go

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:04PM (#50818803)

    Hi, I've stopped using Go when I saw the hacky stuff I need to do to get libraries like OpenGL to behave correctly. (see https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/LockOSThread) Are there any plans to fix this?

    • Not sure there is anything to fix there... Have you given a look recently to https://github.com/go-gl [github.com] ? The main issue here is that you need a specific goroutine to "sit" on a specific thread and process your OpenGL flow; it's already covered with some hacks, AFAIK.
    • Yes, OpenGL is a big hack. Why is this Go's problem?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        AC was referring to the fact you need to run all OpenGL code from same thread. Go's goroutines are not guaranteed to run on same thread (unless you do some black magic sorcerery).
        • by luis_a_espinal ( 1810296 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @04:40PM (#50820563)

          AC was referring to the fact you need to run all OpenGL code from same thread. Go's goroutines are not guaranteed to run on same thread (unless you do some black magic sorcerery).

          A deficiency that's not Go's problem to solve IMO.

          • A deficiency that's not Go's problem to solve IMO.

            So you're saying that people should adopt Go only once all the major deficiencies in other common software systems have been addressed? That's going to be when hell freezes over.

            (In addition, there are reasons for why OpenGL is the way it is; it's not a deficiency, it's a tradeoff.)

          • by guruevi ( 827432 )

            You have obviously no idea how the lower-level architectures of your computer operate.

            On some platforms (eg. Intel), a single processor will have access to only a portion of the busses (eg. the PCIe bus and the memory). So anything that has access to specific hardware (say a GPU or a specific memory area) has to run on a specific processor (and that is done at a higher level by keeping it in the same thread). Sure you can go about it by doing an (automatic) memcpy every time you need to switch physical proc

            • Heh, I'm an engineer at a graphics card company and part of architectural team there. So perhaps you have me confused with someone else and took my comment in a completely different context than I intended.

              I have a love hate relationship with OpenGL, my accusation that OpenGL is a hack is perhaps a tad hyperbolic. I see a lot of the warts having to work with the driver details for a living (system sw team), but it is interesting to work on and does feed my family.

      • Why even use OpenGL directly? It's been called the assembly language of graphics. It has no brains when it comes to sorting polygons by visibility, it just dumbly draws everything in the list your program builds for it, whether visible or not. It's up to your source code to employ a little algorithmic cleverness to prune the list. But even if you do, you soon find that unless the pruning is very good, performance is still unsatisfying. To make the pruning excellent requires implementation of some fairl

        • Because, quite often, you don't want to use a library. I like Ogre, but I do a lot of OpenGL stuff too, it's just convenient when you have simple scenes. This is more common than it may seem, I have several tools I support for my team (or have supported in the past) that are just very simple OpenGL calls.

      • Yes, OpenGL is a big hack. Why is this Go's problem?

        The world is full of "big hacks" and shitty software, so languages that can't deal well with such systems aren't going to cut it. In different words, it's Go's problem because users aren't going to use Go if they can't get their work done in it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Instead of linking your app to OpenGL you can instead create a separate process that will do that and communicate to it through a socket. You know, like X11 does. This way you are not putting driver guts in your process space like Win 3.1 used to do. See http://msharov.github.io/gleri... [github.io] for an example.

    • The very first thing I tried to compile under Go's build scheme failed because of headers I don't have for a sub-service I don't need.

      It was the "cups connector" for Google cloud print and it wanted libavahi.h even though I don't want or need any of that local network auto configuration stuff.

      If the build system can't do what "configure" (autotools) does, or CMake, or CPAN, or any of the other portability systems, then it's not really portable is it.

      Go? It went right to bit-bucket for now.

  • by ZeroPly ( 881915 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:05PM (#50818813)
    There's already a game called Go, which has about a gazillion articles on how to program it. Couldn't you come up with a name that would be less ambiguous? Now, when you see a user group for "Go programming", you have no clue which one it is.
    • by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:14PM (#50818879) Homepage
      I agree. I saw the headline and thought I was going to see an interesting article about Go and computers, maybe something explaining in detail how Monte Carlo methods have made Go programs much more successful than the older brute force used to be. But nope. Maybe someone should write a program in Go to play Go for maximum confusion.
    • There's already a game called Go, which has about a gazillion articles on how to program it. Couldn't you come up with a name that would be less ambiguous? Now, when you see a user group for "Go programming", you have no clue which one it is.

      In conversation, I refer to it as golang. You are right on your point about potential for confusion but I don't think your example is apt anymore. Googling for programming go [google.com] appears to yield only results about golang. Also, it is not without tangential benefits like being able to call Go developers "gophers."

      I think when I first started programming Groovy long ago I stumbled upon a website promising that software development was groovy ... that's no longer the case when I google for groovy programm

      • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @03:09PM (#50819833) Homepage Journal

        why couldn't the name have been a SHA-256 hash of the initial specification document or a UUID. So instead of "Go" we could all say "one two three echo four five six seven dash echo eight nine bravo dash one two delta three dash alfa four five six dash four two six six five five four four zero zero zero zero". Then it wouldn't be ambiguous and unlikely to have search collisions if you search as "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426655440000"

      • The problem is for us who want to read about programming Go, the strategy game, and don't care in the least about some new, fancy programming language.

    • Couldn't you come up with a name that would be less ambiguous?

      Forth [wikipedia.org] was already taken.

    • by fnj ( 64210 )

      Go and Rust are both stupidly named. Try googling "go" or "rust". It's hopeless.

    • This is a common problem for products in English [igorinternational.com]. You can overload a name with something common such as Go, C or Forth and have name collision or make up something new such as GoLang and have to educate people.
  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:06PM (#50818821)

    Why the hell would anyone use Go?

    (Serious question, since our editors didn't tell us why Go was created, what Go's intended purpose was and whether or not anyone is actually using Go.)

    • Why the hell would anyone use Go?

      (Serious question, since our editors didn't tell us why Go was created, what Go's intended purpose was and whether or not anyone is actually using Go.)

      As a software developer here that likes to fiddle with all languages, the second paragraph [wikipedia.org] from Wikipedia seems to answer your question nicely: "It is a statically typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collection, type safety, some structural typing capabilities,[2] additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library."

      So from the first few words someone might know C and desire garbage collection to be handled for

      • adding garbage collection

        Well, if all of computer language history is any guide, that's going to present an asynchronous performance issue.

        I'm a C programmer by choice. I require that the program does what I told it to, when I told it to. Anything else is malbehavior. Data structures are not garbage unless and until I say they are. So, if go follows the example of every other garbage-collected language I've run into thus far, I'd need to disable garbage collection (and most likely anything else that is runn

        • Go is obviously not for what you do. Neither is Java or C# for that matter..

          I would put Go's useful problem space to be nearly exactly the same as Java and C#, with one notable difference, Go is not controlled by Oracle or Microsoft. I'm not sure how that matters, but it's something.

          • by fyngyrz ( 762201 )

            Go is obviously not for what you do.

            That was my impression.

            I'm still interested to hear what kind of answer might issue forth from Kernighan and/or Donovan.

            A follow up question is, when I'm not constrained by high performance, I have been using Python 2-series. Does go offer something worthy of the effort to move to it there?

            • Ah, well that question doesn't have a clear answer from the information given.

              Python is a scripting language, Go, not so much. I think Python would have a bit lower footprint in terms of disk space used and memory consumed so it might be a bit faster in a resource constrained environment where a C programmer might find themselves, but for most applications you'd write in Python I doubt there is much of a noticeable difference if you wrote it in Go.

              Go is basically useful in the same kinds of use cases whe

              • by packman ( 156280 )

                > I think Python would have a bit lower footprint in terms of disk space used and memory consumed so it might be a bit faster in a resource constrained environment where a C programmer might find themselves, but for most applications you'd write in Python I doubt there is much of a noticeable difference if you wrote it in Go.

                A Python runtime + all scripts and used modules would consume a lot more diskspace than a Go application. Go might produce pretty big binaries, but on my system, the python2.7 binar

                • Again, this is a "use case" question and I said at the start that we didn't have enough information.

                  If you are just cooking up some small script thing on the fly and python is already built and on your system, python wins. But if you are looking to deploy something in an embedded system with limited resources, getting a already compiled Go program onboard might be better. You will need to "cross compile" that Go program to make it run, but once you have that, it will be smaller than the whole python dist

            • Go is obviously not for what you do.

              That was my impression.

              I'm still interested to hear what kind of answer might issue forth from Kernighan and/or Donovan.

              A follow up question is, when I'm not constrained by high performance, I have been using Python 2-series. Does go offer something worthy of the effort to move to it there?

              Speed and static typing. I do Python for a living (along Java and C/C++), and I dream of using a statically typed language that does some of the Python/Ruby syntatic magic. Go might be one way to do just that (read "might be", not necessarily "is" or "will be").

          • by radish ( 98371 )

            If Java is controlled by Oracle then Go is controlled by Google. Neither worries me particularly.

            I don't personally see much of a need for Go in my world (high throughput web services), but I know some of the ops folks in my company like it for the stuff they do - and anything which gets more C out of the stack gets my vote :)

            • by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @07:02PM (#50821319)

              Java is LICENSED by Oracle who doesn't give out the source code... Go is BSD licensed and has source code so you can build your own copy.

              Check with Oracle about the terms they use if you want to distribute their Java Virtual Machine in a commercial product. I can assure you it involves you providing them with cash before they will let you even distribute Java, unmodified, as part of your product. I know this from experience. I'll warn you, Java from Oracle does NOT come cheap if you wish to distribute it. Sure they will let you and your customer download it for free, but they want their cut if you download and distribute Java to a customer.

              With Go, there will be no such restriction. You can build and distribute Go to your hearts content w/o paying anybody even if you charge for it. You can embed Go in a project, modify it and sell it without having to give up your source code (as I read the license) as long as you leave the BSD license alone.

              • by psmears ( 629712 )

                Check with Oracle about the terms they use if you want to distribute their Java Virtual Machine in a commercial product. I can assure you it involves you providing them with cash before they will let you even distribute Java, unmodified, as part of your product. I know this from experience. I'll warn you, Java from Oracle does NOT come cheap if you wish to distribute it. Sure they will let you and your customer download it for free, but they want their cut if you download and distribute Java to a customer.

                OK, I checked with Oracle, and they said this [java.com]:

                Can I distribute Java with my software?
                Yes, you can provide Java with your software provided you abide by the terms and conditions of Java binary code license.

                Go is great, and there are definitely advantages to Go's BSD licensing model, but this is not one of them :)

                • You need to read the "Binary Code License Agreement" because that's where the terms are set. So YEA, you can distribute it, but if you distribute the "commercial features" (and my product does) you need a separate license. They charge for that license.
        • C has a lot going for it. It's simple, portable, ubiquitous. The language lets you do whatever you want with minimal fuss or overhead. Its generated assembly code is fast and efficient. Because it's the system language of choice for operating systems, nearly every other language can interop with C to some degree. C++ is largely backwards compatible with it. If you want a library to be portable with just about everything else, you write it in C. Great.. awesome so far.

          That being said, C requires that

        • by radish ( 98371 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @06:45PM (#50821249) Homepage

          Why aren't you writing in assembler? Actually scrub that - how's your microcode? What always amuses me about the bare metal brigade is that they're often not actually that close to the metal.

          Different levels of abstraction work for different tasks, and it's always a trade off. Security vs Reliability vs Performance vs Resource Usage vs Developer Time vs Maintainability vs ... you get the picture. Anyone who tells me their tool of choice is appropriate for all tasks is telling me they have a very restricted view of the world. I write mainly in Scala these days but there are plenty of things I wouldn't try to use it for, and I sure as hell wouldn't write my services in C!

      • This.

        We use it in very specific places because it works well there (some of our services junctions points) and has excellent concurrency primitives. This lets us overlook the drawbacks that would arise by using it as a general purpose language. I suspect that we use it in the fashion that Google initially intended to use it (they use it much more pervasively now I believe.)

  • by James Kissel ( 2831453 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:13PM (#50818871)
    How does 'The Go Programming Language' compare to 'The C Programming Language'?
    • How does 'The Go Programming Language' compare to 'The C Programming Language'?

      About as well as Java compares with "C" and in almost exactly the same ways.

      • by psmears ( 629712 )

        How does 'The Go Programming Language' compare to 'The C Programming Language'?

        About as well as Java compares with "C" and in almost exactly the same ways.

        That's doing Go a massive disservice; Go differs from Java in very significant ways. To name but a few:

        • Go's source code is much less verbose (due to deliberate decisions on the part of the designers)
        • Go produces (by default) native static executables, so no need to bring a JVM before you can run your code
        • Go compiles to native machine code (not bytecode), so there is no JIT warm-up penalty
        • Go's concurrency model is much more sophisticated than Java's - making it much easier to write concurrent programs th
        • Being less verbose isn't necessarily a good thing. All it really does is abstract away behind keywords and syntax the complex things that are really going on. Where it's not a bad thing when done well, it does make the language harder to learn and use well. My favorite example is C++ constructors/destructors and variables going in and out of scope in the middle of a statement sometimes, if you don't understand why all this happens, why the compiler hid this activity, you can get yourself into serious tro

  • by genocitizen ( 2763555 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:14PM (#50818877)
    Why was package versioning left out? And are you guys still fond of this decision? As I use Go more and more I see this to be the weak spot; software has been around for many decades, and we all know that it is continuous evolution. Go's import system does not allow specifying or hinting a version, nor does the `go get` command (although it supports major VCSes), and that's how hacks like gopkg.in have been conceived. And it's not like package managers for other languages haven't already solved in a more or less elegant way the problem already...
    • by TopSpin ( 753 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:30PM (#50819009) Journal

      I'd be a Go programmer today except for this. Every major programming platform in use today has a module system to manage dependencies except Go. Go gives you "go get" to haul gobs of source into your tree, after which you get to build and maintain the mess.

      The Go folks cop-out and say this problem is one "for the community." Well, it has been six years and "the community" is still schlepping around, making messes with "go get" and inventing bad workarounds for the projects.

      Got a plan for this? You should.

      • I've seen people not updating 'master' of their git repository because of this...utterly ridiculous. It makes new releases difficult to adopt and becomes soon detrimental to change in general. The package managers which have been developed (Godep, gb, glide) are not of the quality you would expect to professionally use Go...I've found issues with all of them (I know they're in high flux, but still).
        • by TopSpin ( 753 )

          One of Google's core Go developers addressed this "master" problem at a golang conference some time ago. He said Go developers are expected to keep master clean. Maybe that works inside Google, where employees must adopt the policies of their employer. For the rest of the world this has been a terrible policy; whatever time one is supposed to have saved with simple abstractions and fast compilers is utterly pissed away herding dependencies and fixing breakage due to changing masters.

          Builds must be easi

          • This is exactly what people need to accept about Golang if they're going to embrace it.

            Google was happy to share it, but their desires for Go are primarily aligned with Google's needs - not the community's. It's not personal, it's business.

            BTW, enjoy the debugging... ;)

      • Got a plan for this? You should.

        As a matter of fact they do. Go 1.5 Vendoring experiment [google.com]

    • by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @02:24PM (#50819439) Homepage Journal
      Because package versioning is not a language issue. It's a build issue, and should be part of your build system.

      "But go get ... reaches out and..." Stop. go get isn't part of the Go langauge; it's the default Go build environment. And yes, it lacks many features you'd want in a so-called "professional" build system (whatever that means this week).

      I get the impression that Go was perhaps intended to be used with repo [android.com], a tool principally used for managing the Android project, but also used elsewhere inside Google to manage large numbers of independent Git repositories. With repo, you establish a common branch or tag name across all the repositories that comprise your project, then "repo sync" to them. Poof! Build and version management. (Sorta.)

      • by NostalgiaForInfinity ( 4001831 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @08:17PM (#50821779)

        Because package versioning is not a language issue. It's a build issue, and should be part of your build system.

        In many languages, building code is a language issue. The fact that Go takes a fairly old-fashioned view of batch compilers and separate build systems is just a choice it makes, not a fundamental part of nature. Furthermore, language issue or not, the question simply becomes why are the commonly used build systems for Go so poor.

  • Error Handling in Go (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JPyObjC Dude ( 772176 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:19PM (#50818921)

    Go language differs from many other languages in how it handles Errors. Can you summarize the benefits and drawbacks to the Go language error handling approach when compared to Java for large scale applications.

  • by bigsexyjoe ( 581721 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:26PM (#50818967)

    Seeing as how it was created after the Internet was big, and one is constantly searching the Internet about the programming language one using, wouldn't you want a distinct name so search results are what the programmer wants? "Go" is the 35th most common word in the English language. When you search for "go" you get entries about games, movies, etc. Google, coincidentally gives the best results if the programming language is what you are searching for, but even Google gives you results for all sorts of things. The programming language isn't even a dominant result on other search engines.

    Obviously, if you use a search engine to find things about "JavaScript" or "Erlang" you get what you want. I can't imagine going through the trouble of creating a programming language and then failing to give it a distinctive name.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Seeing as how it was created after the Internet was big, and one is constantly searching the Internet about the programming language one using, wouldn't you want a distinct name so search results are what the programmer wants? "Go" is the 35th most common word in the English language.

      Try searching for "golang".

    • Python brings up all kinds of interesting snake videos on YouTube.
    • It was already hard enough to locate new and interesting developments in programming Go, the strategy game. Now it's practically impossible.

      But then, who cares about people working on solving some of the most cutting edge AI problems encountered in board gaming.

  • by Behrooz Amoozad ( 2831361 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:26PM (#50818969)
    For what scenarios and projects do You recommend it and for which you recommend against using Go?
    • by packman ( 156280 )

      Do:
      - cli tools
      - server software, especially stuff offering webservices. Has a mature http(s) server in the stdlib, and there are surprisingly mature libraries with DNS server, SSH server/client, ... functionality are out there and being used in a lot of projects.

      Don't: GUI stuff, the libraries just aren't there.

      Questionable: Web stuff. Ok if you have a static frontend which talks to webservices implemented in Go. Using Go stricly to serve dynamic pages is possible, but I wouldn't recommend it.

  • by bigsexyjoe ( 581721 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:30PM (#50819005)

    I can understand the convenience of not needing to mark a class as an implementer of an interface. But on the other hand, it would be nice if you at least had the option of marking a class as an implementer of an interface, so your IDE could tell you your class is not complete.

  • Gos potential (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:37PM (#50819057)

    What serious long-term real-world potential do you see for Go?

    How do you see the potential of Go replacing existing open source webstacks such as Apache and PHP, Python or Ruby? Was Go built with a technology update of existing approaches in mind? How feasible is it in your opinion to try and replace the existing complex stacks with pure Go runtimes?

    • by packman ( 156280 )

      I think the long-term real-world potential is already showing in the "devops" world, with a lot of new interesting and cool projects being written in Go:

      - Docker
      - Consul, packer, otto, terraform, ... (and pretty much everything else Hashicorp wrote after Vagrant)
      - Heka
      - InfluxDB
      - etcd
      - kubernetes
      - ...

      I don't think Go will replace webstacks, it's more suitable for backends (with webservices) imho

  • Official Go IDE? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:40PM (#50819083)

    Is there an official cross-plattform Go IDE in the works? Experience shows that adoption is accelerated by offering a solid toolkit that is easy to pick up and get started with - such as the formidable Android Studio IDE Google offers to developers. Are there any plans similar to this for Go?

    I would like to see it take the place of C++ in the development of performant end-user applications with GUIs - are there any officially sanctioned projects that aim to provide a serious GUI toolkit and stack based on Go?

  • A large hindrance for seaching information on Go is its name. Many people have pointed this out already.

    What plans does the Go project team have in terms of naming conventions to make future searching for information on Go easyer? Is there an alternative term that you recommend using when searching Google for Go related information - perhaps something like the term "go-lang" or so?

    What plans does the Go core team have to mitigate this problem? What approach to searching for Go stuff do you recommend right n

    • One of the creators of forking unix are offering to take questions, and multiple people are asking about the branding. Slashdot, 2015. PS Consider the C and C++ programming languages.
    • by packman ( 156280 )

      When you're new to go, one of the first things you learn is searching for "golang" instead of "go" :)

  • For someone like me who likes garbage collection, multiple dispatch, and extreme abstraction capabilities in high level languages like Common Lisp, and safety, compile-time error detection, readability, and speed in low level languages like Ada or Haskell, what are the benefits of using Go in comparison to these two different types of languages? What new useful features does Go bring?

    • The main feature in Go is channels and the light weight threads you can use with them (goroutines). Go is for writing a certain style of concurrent program, and it does not intend to rival Common Lisp in language features. (I'd take ML over Lisp, I think the type inference in ML is a pleasure to use compared to Lisp)

  • There many books on "how to program" but few on "how to program well". Brian, your book "The Elements of Programming Style" is a wonderful and a classic, but my students have a hard time reading the examples (Fortran 66 and PL/I).

    Is there any hope for an update?
    Is there any similar modern-language book that you recommend?

    Michael Nahas (son of Joe Nahas)

    P.S. I totally stole as much as I could from you when writing my tutorial for the language Coq. Sorry/Thanks!

  • by MountainLogic ( 92466 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @03:43PM (#50820173) Homepage
    As the legend has it, C was created to support operating system development. As time has gone by C++ has slipped into OS development on larger platforms. It seems that much of the current core use of mother C is centering on embedded processors (all the way down to 8 bit micros with 256 bytes of RAM) and drivers in larger systems. For current use what design choices in C do you see as wise and what would you change given the current usage of C.
    PS: Thanks you for co-authoring the most wonderful, perfect, clear and concise technology document ever.
  • by slashdice ( 3722985 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @03:52PM (#50820233)
    Come on, be honest!
  • How and when would you introduce kids to programming?

  • Go objects (Score:4, Interesting)

    by StealthyRoid ( 1019620 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @08:14PM (#50821757) Homepage
    I'm curious as to the design decisions that led to the way that Go objects are implemented, which feel and seem to operate like C structs w/ function pointers. Yes, all objects are essentially structs with function pointers, but most languages provide a good deal of syntactic and functional candy on top of them to make them more useful. With Go objects, you get sortof-inheritance, sortof-polymorphism, and sortof-encapsulation, which requires re-thinking a lot of design patterns that people learn working with languages like C++, Java, and even PHP. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can see arguments for forcing people to get out of their comfortable patterns, I'd just like to know why.
  • Any response to articles like this talking about how the runtime is crap?

    http://dtrace.org/blogs/wesolo... [dtrace.org]

  • Reimplementing the Gnu+Linux toolchain in GoLang could provide safety that decades of eyes on C could not (thinking about the recent BASH bugs & OpenSSL overruns).

    Even a small portion would add security to Android. Performance is close & 1.5's library loading should keep executables light.

    Is there interest in rebuilding Linux's base userland?

  • by snadrus ( 930168 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @12:25AM (#50822883) Homepage Journal

    Could the GoLang team produce a walkthrough on enhancing the compiler?
    Even something as simple as making the code more idiomatic (since it was translated) could garner huge increases in contributions.
    A guide to the structure would also be helpful.

  • What would your advice be to people looking for work as a programmer? Either straight out of college with a CS degree, not a CS degree (but a degree), or someone transitioning to it from something else.

  • The future of Go (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Serious Callers Only ( 1022605 ) on Thursday October 29, 2015 @05:31AM (#50823595)

    Now that Go has been in the wild for some time, which parts of the language would you change, and which bits have been an unexpected success?

    Are there any plans for Golang version 2, and what might that include?

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