A brief primer on Go - it's origins, its features, and why you may want to use it in your next software project

1. Ready, Set, GO!
Chad McCallum
ASP.NET MVP
iQmetrix Software
www.rtigger.com - @ChadEmm
An Introduction to the Go Programming
Language

2. What is Go?
 A programming language!
 Initially created as a Google 20% project
 Released as an open source project on November
10th, 2009
 Go 1 (version 1) released on March 28th, 2012

3. The Software Development Landscape
 Born out of frustration with current languages
 There was a choice between efficient compilation, efficient execution, or
ease of programming – most languages didn’t offer all three
 Computers are faster, but software development isn’t
 Dependency management is an unnecessarily large, complex part of
software development
 The complexity and awkwardness of type systems are losing out to
languages like Python and JavaScript
 Old languages haven’t caught up to modern affordances, like garbage
collection and parallel computation
 Multicore programming is scary and worrysome

4. Enter Go
 Possible to compile a large program in a few seconds on a
single computer
 Provides a dependency model that avoids the overhead of
traditional systems
 The type system has no hierarchy, so no time is lost
defining relationships
 Fully garbage collected and provides primitives for
concurrent execution and communication
 By design, offers an approach to system software on
multicore machines

5. A Review of Go’s Features
 Simple language specification
 Compiles statically linked binaries without external
dependencies
 Remote package management
 Concurrency primitives

6. Simple Language Specification
 “Language specification simple enough to keep in a
programmer’s head”
 No type inheritance (uses duck typing)
 No method or operator overloading
 No pointer math
 No assertions
 No generic programming

7. Statically Linked Binaries
 Compiles to native machine code (x86 and ARM)
 All referenced libraries are compiled into the same binary
– no need to install libraries or framework on target
machine
 Because there’s no intermediate language, interpreter, or
framework, applications start and run with minimal
overhead

8. Remote Package Management
 Can import dependencies directly from remote
repositories, like GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code
 go get github.com/ChadMcCallum/gotest
 Uses the current version of the code in “master” (git) or “default”
(mercurial)
 Downloaded to local GOPATH folder

9. Concurrency Primitives
 goroutine – executes function on a lightweight process
 Similar to task pools in .NET, functions are executed on any
available thread allocated by the application
 Ensures routines don’t block each other
 Allows developers to write synchronous code while being fully non-
blocking
 Channels provide a way to read and write between
routines without managing synchronization
 A routine that writes to a channel will wait until its message is
received
 A routine that reads from a channel will wait until it receives a
message

10. Why Choose Go?
 Why choose any language?
 Popularity – is there a decent amount of community support?
 Language-domain match – is the strengths of the language geared
towards your problem domain?
 Libraries – what packages already exist that you can reuse?
 Efficiency – does the compiler and execution match up with your
project’s requirements?
 Tools – do the appropriate coding, debugging, tracing, and testing
tools exist?

11. Popularity
 Currently 36th on the TIOBE Index (March 2014)
 Used in a number of large projects at Google
 Youtube.com, dl.google.com, Google App Engine
 Used in a number of production systems
 Bit.ly, Torbit, pool.ntp.org, Canonical, CloudFlare, Conformal, Nov
artis, BBC, SoundCloud, Moovweb, Heroku, Nokia
 4472 questions in StackOverflow
 16681 topics on the golang-nuts group

12. Language-Domain Match
 Targeted at systems programming
 Strengths in concurrency and deployment model
 Mostly used in server and message-processing scenarios
 Can, and does, support other scenarios
 Web apps, games, graphical tools, education

13. Libraries
 25,522 repositories on GitHub
 Application containers,
 web frameworks,
 websockets,
 continuous integration,
 shared key-value stores,
 shared cache,
 distributed messaging,
 maching imaging,
 SQL engines,
 service orchestration,
 client code generation,
 analytics,
 autocomplete,
 load testing,
 http traffic capture,
 static site generation,
 geolocation,
 PaaS

14. Efficiency
 Natively compiled binaries
 Not interpreted
 No external dependencies
 No Intermediate Language, Common Language Runtime, or
Virtual Machine
 Calculating 8 primes in parallel
.NET Tasks – 12.6 seconds Goroutines – 5.99 seconds

15. Tools
 go build – compiles packages and dependencies into
executable
 go fix – rewrites programs that use old APIs to use the
newest version
 go fmt – changes source code to match go standard
 go get – download and install packages and dependencies
 go install – compile and install packages and dependencies
 go run – compile and run program
 go test – run tests in packages

16. IDEs
 LiteIDE – cross-platform IDE with support for Go and
Markdown
 Go plugin for Eclipse (Goclipse) – plugin for Eclipse
 Zeus – Windows-only IDE with Go support
 All three offer debugging, syntax highlighting, and code
completion

17. Ready, Set, GO!
 golang.org
 tour.golang.org
 play.golang.org
 godoc.org
 gobyexample.com
 goinggo.net
Chad McCallum
@ChadEmm
www.rtigger.com