IMHO, it's not really a good language for mobile development. It is great for the task it was designed for; web services and infrastructure. I can't think of any other area I would choose to use Go.
People use JavaScript to develop mobile apps, for example. The rapid compile times would be great for iterative development and the fast performance might even be better than Dalvik.
Go falls short as a language for mobile in the same ways it falls short as a language for most things. It's simply not a very well-designed language.
Let me give you a few examples:
Terrible support for generic programming. Read almost any production go code and you see many instances of the interface{} type. This is basically equivalent to up-casting to Object in java, or passing things around as null* in C++. In many cases, that's the best you can do. All the type-safety of Python with five times the verbosity.
Many features are built-in, non-extensible language directives. Take the `range` operator. `range` only supports built-in types like maps, slices, and chans. You want to range over a tree? Too bad. Want to range over a graph? Too bad. Want to range over a queue or a linked list? Hmm, well too bad, or maybe wrap the queue or LL with a chan, write a helper function, range over that, and watch your performance go to shit.
Go was built with one purpose in mind; building web services. It's good at that. But really, the only things Go has going for it are decent threading primitives and a solid standard library.
So the answer is this: Go is not a bad language, but it is certainly no better than existing languages for writing mobile applications. Go offers nothing that would make me, if I were a mobile app developer, want to switch from Java or Objective-C. In fact, it's missing a lot of things that I might consider important.
var e elem
for nonrangeable.HasNext() {
e = nonrangeable.Next()
// do stuff with e
}
(I'm also very biased, but I think this approach fits better with the fact that Go is targeted towards stream processing)
Also canonical is building QML support for golang, so they seem to think it's well suited to build apps for Ubuntu http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HB-3o8Cysec
Go was built with one purpose in mind; building web services.
App Engine is a web service. Whether you agree with that statement or not, it replies your question.
There are a lot more reasons than that.
For one, Go has awful support for any kind of generic programming. The closest thing Go has to proper generic support is the interface{} type, which is awful. It's basically the same type safety as a 100% dynamically typed language (i.e. almost none), but with a much uglier syntax.
A related issue is that Go isn't very extensible. For example, Go's iteration features only work on builtin types. You can't iterate over trees, graphs, sets, or any other non-builtin type.
For me, the only good things that Go offers are decent threading primitives and good standard library support. Nothing else excels, and some things are downright bad.
I might not agree with this comment, but at least his showing the reasons why he dont think Go is a good candidate for mobile development, and his opinion is technical backed
I think this should be in some HN etiquette somewhere.. dont know why people are so sensitive when a comment is not to say something nice about something..
For example, if there are 10 Go developers for every 100 Python developers viewing HN, in a thread such as this one, there may be 9 Go developers for every 5 Python developers. This means that a large percentage of viewers of any critical Go posts in a Go thread are Go developers. They will downvote that critical post almost regardless of content.
This is not a knock on Go developers, merely standard tribalism. There is an identical effect in Haskell, Ruby, or even Perl discussions. There is probably no solution - if you value karma, I recommend not posting critical comments about a language in a post specific to that thread. You should rather save those comments for more general threads about programming theory, etc. If you don't care about karma (and you shouldn't), then please keep posting.
Some people clearly feel quite strongly that generics are a vital part of any language. But they don't really tie into the difficulties of mobile app programming, which are (i) resource contraints, much tighter and differently prioritised to desktop and server programs; and (ii) dealing with GUI libraries, which typically have massive numbers of functions, nests of callbacks, and are generally fiddly to program. Generics can be a help with various algorithms but it's far from clear that they help with mobile-specific issues.
Your parent poster is the typical person who shouts about generics in every Go thread. Like the people who spit bile every time Stephen Wolfram is mentioned in any context, it gets pretty tiresome.
Nothing. Someone said something along the lines of "Go is only bad for mobile because it has bad GUI support." I disagreed.
Mobile development is more than just GUI development.
If the only thing I cared about when writing a mobile app was GUI support, I could write mobile apps in HyperCard.