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Go offers scalable alternative to C++


By Alex Handy


 Alex Handy
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August 20, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Go quietly entered the world outside of Google in 2009. At the time, it was described as a “20%-time project” to build a better C++. Along the way, the language has won over many new fans who claim it offers an easier way to write massively scalable applications.

Today, the language is available as version 1.0.2, and the development world is abuzz at the prospects of this concurrent, garbage-collected language. Mark Summerfield, a development consultant and author, became so enamored with Go that he wrote a book on the language, titled “Programming in Go: Creating Applications for the 21st Century.”

“I read the specification early on within a few weeks of them announcing it publicly, and it just grabbed me,” he said. “It was an interesting spec, it was clear and understandable. You could see some of their sources: It's C-oriented, but they've also given you some high-level stuff. Maps are like Python dictionaries. Slices are like Python lists.”

But the final straw for Summerfield, a longtime C++ developer, was when he saw C++11. “I've been searching for a long time for an alternative to C++, because C++ is getting harder and harder to be a master of,” he said. “With C++11, you've got to be a guru. It has loads of great new things, but it gives you a huge language, and they haven’t deprecated enough. For example, they introduced tuples, but didn't deprecate pairs. You can use tuples instead of pairs if you want. They should have deprecated some of this stuff because they do better things now. C I find too frustrating, too low-level. I thought Go looked like a nice candidate there. I started with Perl, Ruby, TCL and JavaScript, but Python is it for me. I wanted to find that in the compiled world.”

Taking its lead from C++ and Python, Go has gathered a following among programmers who've had many of the same complaints as Summerfield. Andrew Gerrand, developer relations lead for Go at Google, said that “The response to Go has been phenomenal. Since the open-source launch in 2009, the project has attracted hundreds of contributors, and developed a growing ecosystem of libraries and tools. A vibrant community of Go users has sprung up to support the language. This is impressive growth, especially when compared to the trajectory of today's mainstream languages.”


Related Search Term(s): C++, Go, Google

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Comments


08/30/2012 02:38:12 PM EST

Given Google's history of coming up with projects and then abandoning them, I would feel very wary about writing anything that might last a long time in Go. I think C++11 with the right libraries offers much of the functionality of Go at the same time based on an ISO standard language

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