I love Go, I love the pragmatism, I love the tool chain, I love the fast compilation to static binaries, I love the ease of cross compilation, I have a windows build server that very easily cross compiles to Linux x64.

For those that don't know yet, I think Go is going to be big. It's been around since 2007 and is the technology of choice for many Silicon Valley start-ups.

So what makes Go special?

• simple yet familiar C-like language
• lightweight threads and safe concurrency with go routines and channels
• eliminates a lot of null reference problems by not allowing null (nil) strings, empty string is the default :-)
• module system allowing good design
• object-oriented features without the complexity of allowing method overrides
• implicitly implemented interfaces are a great idea, maybe my favourite Go feature
• built-in concurrent garbage collector with typical "stop-the-world" pause time of 50µs
• great designed feature rich standard library, including HTTP(2) client and server
• fast compiler that produces static binaries, no runtime environment or JIT needed
• simple cross compilation, my windows PC can easily build for Linux, Solaris, OS X, BSD, x86, x64, ARM, with Android and iOS being added
• build in tools for testing, test coverage, benchmarking and profiling

Why use Go? Why use anything else?

• C and C++ are slow to compile and you have to do manual memory management
• Java requires the JVM to be installed and the JIT suffers from slow startup
• C# requires the .NET framework and the JIT also has slow startup, although this is improving
• Python requires the runtime, lots of Go developers have moved from Python for this reason

Links:

• Go Home Page
• Support via Google Groups

You can set a public module variable using the linker:

go install -ldflags "-X main.Version v1.2.3" my/program