Communications of the ACM
Google's Go Language Is Off to a Great Start, but Still Has Work Ahead
Google's open source Go programming languages has its pluses and minuses.
Credit: Google
Google's open source Go programming language has its pros and cons.
One of Go's positive attributes is that it is easy to write and install Go-based applications, says developer Steve Francia. In addition, the language has advantages in terms of compilation, as C, C++, and Java take a long time to compile, while Go is very quick. Go also has a simple, small language syntax, enabling developers to read the entire Go specification within two hours and understand it.
In addition, Google's programming language "has concurrency built into it as a language, which makes it nice that it can take advantage of multicore processors out of the box," Francia notes.
The best reason to use Go is that it has the financial support of Google, which means it has a solid standard library and good cross-platform support, according to Web developer Will Yager.
Finally, Go is multiplatform and portable, which gives it advantages over other programming languages.
However, Go is still a very young language. Although languages such as Python and Java have extensive libraries for natural-language processing, Go is lacking in this aspect.
Go's main marketing claim is it is simple, but Francia says Go's simplicity is mostly superficial, and in its effort to achieve simplicity the developers disregarded valuable programing language progress.
From InfoWorld
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