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Comment by webreac | Hacker News Reader

It is too sad, they choose the name of my favourite game to name a language. Now it is near impossible to make google searches about game of go.

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The popularity of the verb "go" doesn't help either of the search terms. It's even in the article itself: "Can Go Go Mainstream?"

Where Would Go Go if a Woodchuck would Go(#) Go?

(#)As in "rewrite all of his woodchucking apps in Go"

To be fair, this will change as go becomes more popular and mature, I don't even know why people keep bringing it up.

Is "C" any more searchable? If C was 3 years old, search results would probably be dominated by pages on the letter "C". I remember search results when C# first came out: most search engines presumed you were talking about musical notes. Java searches kept showing me pages about coffee suppliers and distributors.

None of these languages have this problem anymore because they are mature, and the context around them is firmly established.

The accepted name for the language when doing searches is "golang", and Google does a great job at optimising results around this term. Also there's the IRC channel and Google group if you can't find what you need.

> Also there's the IRC channel and Google group if you can't find what you need.

The irc channel is #go-nuts in freenode, in case anyone was wondering.

And there is also http://www.reddit.com/r/golang

To avoid that obvious namespace collision, the Go language is usually referred to as "Golang".

Shouldn't they just rename the language to GoLang?

I've been trying to examine the suitability of Go as a language for creating video games in, which is extremely difficult to search for, for exactly that reason.

If anyone on HN who is familiar with Go has any thoughts on that, I would love to hear them.

I've been looking at making a 2D game library for Go based on some older Go code, and various people have made similar efforts, but there's nothing yet that's full and complete. The best option in most cases is to use bindings to OpenGL/SDL/SDL2 for 2D, or bindings to a 3D game engine (Horde3D bindings are available, and there's at least one engine built largely in Go)

There have been a few people making games in Go. Games: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2066438441/haunts-the-ma... http://blog.iandavis.com/tag/amberfell/ https://github.com/iand/amberfell http://www.pokemon-universe.com/ http://code.google.com/p/pokemon-universe/

Engines/Libraries: http://code.google.com/p/gohorde/ https://github.com/genbattle/Go2D https://github.com/DeedleFake/sdl https://github.com/Agon/baukasten https://github.com/chsc/gogl https://github.com/foobaz/egl

There's prorbably more stuff around, but this is what I have collected so far. The biggest concern when making games is the GC; you'll either get a choppy framerate from occasional GC runs, or you'll get a consistent overhead from running the GC every frame. If/when the GC becomes concurrent this situation will vastly improve for games.

Thank you for the very informative post :)

Search on weichi or baduk instead?

Try "weiqi" (the correct spelling).

I can't imagine that searches for "go" ever turned up anything useful, though. I'm guessing that most searches regarding Go/weiqi will have something Go-specific in them. "go tsumego" is probably going to give you something useful, regardless of the existance of the Go language. (And if one's searches are still limited to "go", head on over to Sensei's Library [1] until that is no longer a problem, it's a great resource)

[1] http://senseis.xmp.net/

Romanization of Chinese words gives a range of different results, doesn't it? To really disambiguate, we'd need to write 圍棋.

Good point about the searches.

Well, there's really only one official romanization of Chinese, which is Pinyin (in which it would be spelled "weiqi"). The others are obsolete or niche.

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