What is the point of Go? What niche does it fill? Is it easy to start working with Go and integrate existing C libraries with it?
We're yet to see which major niche Go fills, if any. There's a growing community of people from different backgrounds using it, and they seem to enjoy it. I personally think it's a lovely language to write all kinds of code in. I recently rewrote our continuous build client in Go, and I found it a cinch to write it in clear, reliable, maintainable way. It's definitely worth checking Go out because, even though it ticks a lot of the same boxes as existing languages, it's quite different from anything else out there in many subtle ways. Certainly for writing server daemons it totally kicks ass.
It's easy to get started. The standard library is featureful (http://golang.org/pkg/), and there's a lot of good documentation (http://golang.org/doc/docs.html). As for integrating with existing code, Go comes with a tool called cgo (http://golang.org/cmd/cgo/) which allows you to write Go code that links with C code. It's pretty easy to use, and there are many third party libraries (http://godashboard.appspot.com/project) that use it. There's also Go support for SWIG for linking against C++ code.
In fact, Go looks like Java with an ActionScript 3.0 syntax.
Is there anything going on for it that Java doesn't have, or do better?
[Edit:
By the way, I keep hearing Go is an excellent language for writing daemons. Why is that? when it doesn't even have anything resembling exception handling, much less a condition system?
This is the Go spec: http://golang.org/doc/go_spec.html
]
If you think that, then you need to take a closer look at Go, or Java, or both. In short: Go compiles to native code (no VM), it has a totally different type system (no classes, not everything is an 'object' like in Java), it permits fine control over memory layout and allocation, it has powerful concurrency primitives (goroutines and channels), and more. Do yourself a favour and look beyond the syntax. It really is very different to Java (or Actionscript?! that's one of the more bizarre comparisons I've heard).
I have looked at Go, as much as the spec would permit me, and what I found was a safe C (or a faster, native Pike) with better concurrency primitives and a dash of higher-order functional goodness.
With respect to the finer control over memory allocation; anything one couldn't have done with pools in a GC'ed language? I would love to see how Go handles intricate manual memory layout specification under heavy load, and how sufficiently smart the compiler/runtime is as it tries to guess the best GC strategy :-)
I wish you all the best.
I think you are understanding it wrong. Go lets you control memory layout, think deciding how things are laid out in a struct. In Java you get indirection and pointers instead. System programming refers mainly to this ability of layout out your data in memory. This makes a world of difference when you are doing high performance code and can control cache locality.
Edit, found the link: http://marc.info/?l=git&m=124111702609723
I had thought that Go had a built-in garbage collector that could not be disabled - is that incorrect? Can you build code that only touches memory with explicit malloc/free (or equivalent) calls?
I was very interested in Go when it was announced, but the GC rules it out for my problem domain (high-performance real-time games). If I can do explicit memory management then that makes it interesting again.
Yes you can. There is a package called 'unsafe' that lets you do pointer arithmetics and turn pointers into valid go types. It requires a bit of finesses, pointers from your own memory obviously wont be counted by the gc etc. Plus you need to make sure you only allocate with your own functions.
That said, the gc is getting along, it's hard to say when it hits a spot where you can use it for soft realtime applications. We just started doing high performance server coding in Go at Tinkercad and I used it while I still was at Google.
Why is Go an excellent language for writing daemons?
I think[1] that it's because Go is light-weight language, but still a "systems language". Low memory use which are important for daemons, while being significantly less complex than C++, and more typed than C.
Building daemons in Java, .Net, python, ruby, whatever really takes an impact on memory usage[2]. And python, ruby also on performance. C++, C takes a impact on development time and/or type safety.
[1]: (I haven't really looked much into Go) [2]: This of cause depends: If you already are using Java and thus have loading many of the libraries needed, I would guess the impact is significantly less.
2) You haven't argued well for the daemon-friendly aspects of Go. Memory footprint is not a valid excuse; I have written daemons in shell-scripts, and they had smaller memory foot print than anything you would write in Ruby or Python, because the shell executable is always resident in memory ;-) In fact, with Go lacking any sort of exception handling mechanism, I think I trust Bash scripts more[1] ;-)
FWIW, the FAQ itself says it doesn't have proper exception handling:
"Why does Go not have exceptions?"
Would you consider C a systems language? well, C is useless under a LispOS, for example. Ditto for Java. If you wrote the whole OS in Java, presto, Java would be the language to write device drivers.
IOW, "systems" is a relative term.