A GIF decoder: an exercise in Go interfaces

blog.golang.org

58 pointsenneff3 comments

Couldn't roughly the same thing be done with relative ease in any language that builds it's IO actions in terms of Input/Output streams?

It's a nice write-up, but I'm not sure it shows off anything particular to Go.

The same thing could certainly be done in other languages. I'm not convinced as to the "relative ease". I find the use of a slice backed by a temporary array particularly cool.

In any case, this post was written to educate Go programmers, and not (primarily) to evangelize Go.

Ah, makes sense. I assumed it was intended to be evangelical.

Also, the slice backed by inline array is a pretty great thing. It's cache-friendly, avoids extra allocations, and is pretty easy to use safely. Aside from D, I don't know of any other usable garbage-collected languages that can do this so nicely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com