an introduction to go programming language

By: SAHWednesday, July 18, 2010

www.GoParser.blogspot.comEmail: tparser@gmail.com

Contents of the session

• Introduction

• Why Go, a new programming language?

• Design goals

• Has or Hasn’t

Introduction

• It’s a Google product

• Project was started in 2007.

• Officially announced in Nov. 2009

• Developed by:Robert Griesemer, Robert C. Pike, Ken Thompson and others.

Introduction cont’d

• Concurrent• System programming Language

Introduction cont’d

• Garbage-Collected

Introduction cont’d

Currently Experimental

Introduction cont’d

• Open Source (Source code is available under BSD license)

Why Go, a new programming language?

Why Go…..? Cont’d

Much has been changed but no new language to address those,say the following changes:

Why Go…..? Cont’d

• Networked and Distributed environment.• Client server environment.• Clustering.

Why Go…..? Cont’d

• To run on it has been possible to have:o More Efficient Hardware.o Multi core and multi chips Processors.

• Rise of dynamically typed languages.• Sprawling Libraries and Dependency chains.• Each main stream language compromise alternatively.

o Efficient compilation,o Efficient execution,o Ease of programming,

• Lack of modern concepts like: garbage collection and parallel computing in popular systems languages.

Why Go…..? Cont’d

All these cannot be addressed well by libraries or Tools; a new language was called for.

"it wasn't enough to just add features to existing programming languages, because sometimes you can get more in the long run by taking things away…. They wanted to start from scratch and rethink everything." Robert C. Pike

Design Goals

Design Goals cont’d

• System Language• Fast compilation

Design Goals cont’d

• Easy dependency analysis and avoid much of the over head of C-Style include files & libraries.

• To make types feel lighter weight than in typical OO languages.• Combine features of interpreted, dynamically typed languages in a system

language. (e.g: ease of programming)• Garbage collected

Design Goals cont’d

• Concurrent• Propose an approach for the construction of system software on

multicores machine.• Increase writability/productivity (e.g: reduce the amount of typing)

Has or Hasn’t

• Syntax is C-like• Statically typed• Procedural paradigm, Imperative programming style• Shorthand syntax for variable assignment• Closures by anonymous functions• Parallelism/concurrency by “Goroutines” & “Channel” mechanism.• Structures• Pointers and References

Has or Hasn’t con’t

• OO? (Yes/No)• Interfaces• Built-in string type• No Assertions• No Exception handling• No while or do-while.• Compiled executables are completely native binaries unlike managed code

however, have some runtime components that get embedded in the executables.

What other says

– TIOBE: Programming language of the year of 2009 (www.tiobe.com).

– Google is going to have its own language like others to fill its tool box.

– Please change the name of your programming language. (Francis G. McCabe - developer of the Go! programming language)

– The name is more appropriate for embedded systems’ language.

References

• www.golang.org• www.google-opensource.blogspot.com

• Concepts of Programming Languagesby Robert W. Sebesta - Addison Wesley.

A Special thanks to Mr. Abdul Wahab for his kind supervision during the course work.

*****For comments & further details visit::. www.goparser.blogspot.com

or email::. tparser@gmail.com

The End

Be Green - Go Green