Re: [9fans] MIPS LSB compiler

[John Barham <jbarham@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 9:12 PM, Roman Shaposhnik <roman@shaposhnik.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 8:34 PM,  <lucio@proxima.alt.za> wrote:
>> "Go" has added a cat amongst the pigeons :-)
> ...
>    * A ducktyping of sorts with interfaces and such. On the surface
> it just saves
>      you a bunch of "extends XXX", but it actually seems to bridge
> the gap between
>      dynamically typed world and a statically typed one to an extent

As a long-time Python programmer, Go's interfaces are what I find most
immediately appealing as they give you the speed and safety of a
compiler w/ the flexibility of swapping in arbitrary types provided
they satisfy the interface.  It's trivially easy compared to C++
(inheriting from a common base class--hah, try doing that w/
std::fstream) or Java (explicitly implementing an interface).  This is
such a common idiom in dynamic languages that it's second nature to
talk about "file like" objects.

And goroutines w/ channels is just icing on the cake.  Although you
take a slight hit vs C or C++ in terms of single threaded performance,
as soon as you're on multi-core, and who isn't nowadays, Go wins.

I see Go pushing C usage down even further to the
embedded/kernel/bootstrap space and rapidly displacing C++ as the
language of choice for developing new high performance
systems--already its out of the box library is much richer than what
C++ gives you, especially for network programming where standard C++
is mute.

Go overlaps w/ a lot of what I've used Python for in systems and
network programming.  Python is very nice when it works but if you
have to escape out to C for speed it quickly becomes a drag.  SWIG
helps but machine generated code is not fun to debug.

And I can't be the first person to wonder when the Go ARM compiler
will be available on Android...

Interesting times indeed.

  John