The Go Programming Language
Why Hacker News recommends it
Used as the primary source for what Go's creators originally promised, such as fast compiles, systems-language framing, safety and generics.
What it is
Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2009 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends ypavan · 2009-11 · on “Google Go: A New Programming Language That’s Python Meets C++”
From the Tech Talk PDF, it is mentioned that Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike started the project in late 2007. Ian Lance Taylor and Russ Cox joined in 2008. And the goal, as they mention, seems to have the efficiency of a statically-typed compiled language with the ease of programming of a dynamic language but with - Safety: type-safe and memory-safe. Good support for concurrency and communication. Efficient, latency-free garbage collection. High-speed compilation. They are aiming at a lightweight type system with no implicit conversions and no more 0x80ULL. A good starting point is their FAQ page and also the tech talk at youtube: [this video]
Cites allenbrunson · 2009-11 · on “Why I'm not very excited about Go”
programming languages influence how you think about programming to such a degree that it's difficult to reason objectively about them. it's rare for me to watch long videos, because they are information-poor for the time investment, but i watched rob pike talk for an hour about go this evening. a lot of it is really interesting, but a lot of things about the syntax made me think: ow, that's going to be painful for me if it becomes successful. rob's talk: [this video]
Cites devrim · 2010-12 · on “OOP practiced backwards is "POO"”
thinking OOP as a solution may lead to an article like this whereas it merely is a vehicle. you may or may not use it. problems of OOP is explained in Go Language video by Rob Pike*, however very intellectually stated arguments in this article are mainly false. [this video]
Cites mseepgood · 2012-09 · on “Will Go be the new go-to programming language?”
The "Talks and Videos" page ( [LINK] ) is outdated as well. Here's my personal list: Why Learn Go? [LINK] Short interview with Rob Pike, OSCON 2012 Get Started with Go [LINK] Andrew Gerrand A Tour of Go [LINK] Russ Cox Go Concurrency Patterns [LINK] Rob Pike, Google I/O 2012 Goroutines, Channels Meet the Go Team [LINK] Panel (Pike, Thompson, Griesemer, Gerrand, Fitzpatrick, Simons), Google I/O 2012 Computing Map Tiles with Go on App Engine [LINK] Chris Broadfoot, Andrew Gerrand, Google I/O 2012 Go in Production [LINK] Gustavo Niemeyer, Google I/O 2012 Go: Code that grows with grace [LINK] (Contains some audio glitches) Andrew Gerrand Interview with Rob Pike [LINK] Rob Pike, GOTO Conference L
Cites dexen · 2013-02 · on “Google Go: The Good, the Bad, and the Meh”
For performance of compilation . Go compiles crazy fast -- think two seconds for complete compiler and runtime on a notebook. This provides for rapid hack-compile-debug iterations. [this video]
Cites mseepgood · 2014-01 · on “Using Rust for an Undergraduate OS Course”
> it seems initially it was meant to be those kind of "systems" From the announcement talk: "And it's a systems language in the sense that we intend it to be used to write things like web servers" [this video] I don't think that Google ever wanted to develop a new OS kernel.
Cites andralex · 2014-08 · on “D for the Win”
Go has been announced as a systems programming language: [this video] . After some backlash the slogan has been changed quietly.
Cites legutierr · 2015-06 · on “Three months of Rust”
If I remember properly, when Go was first developed, compilation time was one of the primary metric that Rob Pike et al were optimizing for, and drove major aspects of its design. It shouldn't be surprising that Go blows other systems out of the water in this regard. Here he is talking about it: [this video]