Thoughts on Go

Along with many other people, I've recently run into Go, a new programming language from Google. I think it's got a lot of potential, and I really want to play with the type system and see how it works out in practice.

I got it running on my server, and quickly got down to writing some thought-experiment code. Once I split the code out into packages, I had some initial difficulty getting it to compile. The Go source tree has some Makefile magic for that, but it presumes that you will want to install your packages into the $GOROOT/pkg directory for use after they're built, so I didn't want to use that directly. Luckily, another intrepid blogger saved me the trouble of figuring out how to build Go code manually.

Go is designed to be good for writing highly-concurrent network services. I think I'll try and bootstrap an XMPP server project in the language, if it feels fun to code the first bits.