For those wondering where is Go mentioned: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html
> You'll implement this lab (and all the labs) in Go.
I'm really glad to see this :-)
CSP/Actor concurrency instead of exposing raw threads is a huge win. Focusing on interfaces instead of ancestry is also a huge win. However, it's really tough for me to get over Go's treatment of null and global mutable state.
It seems to me a bit of a waste to design a new statically typed language that intentionally allows the most common type error, as if Tony Hoare's Billion Dollar Mistake wasn't a mistake. One of the smartest things Bjarne Stroustrup did was disallow null in C++'s reference semantics.
It also seems a waste to give a language somewhat Erlang-like CSP/Actor-based concurrency, and then allow direct mutation of global state. This makes it much easier to introduce concurrency bugs, and also hurts garbage collector performance.
Maybe I just tried out Go too early. Does Go still use the Plan9 ABI and come with a copy of kenc so you can recompile your C source to be linkable against your Go code? Are the language creators still the only ones allowed to create generics?