Google has announced the public release of its own proprietary programming language named ‘Go’. The company has been using the programming language internally for a while – but has now made the entire platform available to outside programmers under an open source license. That means it is pretty much free for anyone to do anything with at this point.
You can view the official Google Go website here: http://golang.org. Where the programming language is described by Google as: “a systems programming language, expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected”. Not certain exactly what that is supposed to mean, but one thing is for sure. When Google introduces something, people take notice. Google claims that the advantages of the new programming language are ease-of-use and speed. According to the Go website, ”Go compilers produce fast code fast. Typical builds take a fraction of a second yet the resulting programs run nearly as quickly as comparable C or C++ code.”
You can view a brief video tutorial on Go from Google Go team member Russ Cox to get an introduction to the new language. The video again re-iterates the theme of speed. Mr. Cox claims that most of his builds take well under a second. There is an example in the video of over 120,000 lines of code running in under ten seconds. Yeah, that’s Google fast. For those interested in just getting started, you can see a full written tutorial with source code examples here: http://golang.org/doc/go_tutorial.html.
So what impact will this new programming language have on the web hosting business sector? It is obviously way too early to tell whether the new language will catch on in a big way, or if the hosting infrastructure to support it will grow rapidly. One hosting provider, however, has already launched a product line specifically designed with the Google Go programming language in mind. According to a recent blog post, UK hosting provider 34SP.com has set up a brand new VPS template, pre-installed with Go, ready for rapid development testing. The company’s blog post says, ”The Go Development VPS template is currently built upon a 64-bit image of Ubuntu Server 9.04, using the latest (as of Friday 12th of November) build of Go and includes a sample ‘Hello World’ script in the /root directory, ready to build. To get you started, the following instructions should allow you to compile and run your very first application with Go”. Click here to read the Google Go blog post in its entirety.
So time will tell if the new Go programming language becomes a mainstream programming platform. It is certain that when Google announces and supports a new computer programming product, the information on it is quickly distributed to many tens of thousands of the world’s top engineers. That fact alone means that Go will probably be a force to be reckoned with in the near future.
