It's Go time

At last, the Go programming language has been publicly released so I can write about it without getting into big trouble.

Go was designed by programmers I hold in high regard. Although it is a new language, the same people already experimented with some of its ideas at least ten years ago.

Back then, I saw a demonstration of the Inferno operating system, the successor to Plan 9, which in turn was the sequel to UNIX. I remain awed that just a handful of programmers could implement a complex system so well. The venerable UNIX crew seem to make the right decision often, and make it ten years ahead of everyone else.

For example, the dis byte code ran on a register-based virtual machine and hence ran fast. In contrast, its chief competitor, Java, has a stack-based virtual machine, and it seemed to take years to realize that this was a poor solution. The problem is so severe that JIT compilation was introduced, weakening the "Write Once, Run Anywhere" mantra: the statement becomes almost meaningless if one requires some sort of compiler for every platform, as opposed to a simple byte code interpreter. Another workaround is to design a register-based virtual machine for Java from scratch.

Another case in point is Limbo, a novel programming language that accompanied Inferno. Sadly Limbo has far fewer adherents than Java, for non-engineering reasons. Like Plan 9 (which remained closed-source until 2000), Inferno was hard to obtain, whereas Java was being given away: indeed, users were once practically forced by their browsers to install Java virtual machines. The relative obscurity of Limbo is therefore expected, as with any human language possessing few speakers and few opportunities for growth.

A second chance

It’s much more exciting this time around. The powers that be have wisely made Go open source. Now that Go is playing on a level field, ideas that Limbo should have popularized finally have a chance to spread far and wide.

My favourite feature is something they left out. As with Limbo, there is no inheritance. There is no stifling type system. At least one generation of programmers has been trained to use a rigid type system, and I believe history will one day prove the inheritance mindset to be a passing fad. I have strong feelings about this topic because I was once a firm believer in inheritance, and it took years to realize my mistake.

Go instead emphasizes interfaces, and provides a simple concise syntax for them. A few neat lines perform the equivalent of several messy lines in C that deal with structs of function pointers.

Go also has strong concurrent programming features, which it shares with Limbo. Different threads (actually, "goroutines") communicate via channels (folowing the CSP model), eliminating race conditions. Channels are essentially type-safe UNIX pipes: they capture the power and delight of writing shell scripts to string together several tools.

Among lesser niceties: nested functions, anonymous functions, multiple return values, the package and import keywords, untyped numerical constants, reflection. Most of my wishes for C have been granted.

I’ll probably mostly stick with C. I’ve grown accustomed to its flaws, and I like squeezing every drop of performance out of code without dropping down to assembly. But for those tasks that require more than a shell script but less than a C project, Go might just fit the bill.