Re: [9fans] Go

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Joseph Stewart
<joseph.stewart@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hmmm... is this Limbo/Newsqueak/Alef inspired?  http://golang.org

Sure.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 5:00 PM, andrey mirtchovski
<mirtchovski@gmail.com> wrote:
> but will it run on Plan 9?

Not yet.  It shouldn't be much effort to port if someone is
interested, but it isn't a matter of just typing mk either.
The main hurdle for the 386 tools is that Go assumes it can
set up a local segment descriptor for a kind of thread-local
storage.  The Plan 9-friendly approach is probably to use a
fixed high stack address for the local storage instead.
Then you'd have to write the OS stuff too.  I need to write a
how-to about porting to a new system.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 5:04 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
> On Tue Nov 10 20:02:34 EST 2009, mirtchovski@gmail.com wrote:
>> but will it run on Plan 9?
>
> would the authors care to contrast go with limbo?

The common concepts—channels, slices, and cheap processes—
have their differences: channels can be typed as one direction or
another, slices have a cap, the processes can be muxed onto
multiple OS threads instead of limited to a single OS thread.
The new concepts are new and shouldn't be ignored: interface types,
the approach to constants, the package system, initialization,
methods on almost any type, the very simple approach to name
visibility (case-sensitive instead of public/private tags), and
other things I am forgetting all combine to make Go feel like
a very different language than Limbo, or for that matter Alef or
Newsqueak.  Don't fall into the trap of thinking it's just like one
of those.

Another contrast with Limbo is that the language compiles to
machine code instead of byte codes.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Roman Shaposhnik <roman@shaposhnik.org> wrote:
> P.S. Russ, are you working for Google now?

Yes.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 5:27 PM, andrey mirtchovski
<mirtchovski@gmail.com> wrote:
> serious question: can i have a link to the 9p implementation, pretty
> please? it doesn't appear in the module list on their website.

There's no 9p implementation.  I thought about writing one
a couple times, and I'd love to do that (I want to write acme
extensions in Go), but it hasn't been a priority.  Another thorny
issue is what to name the package, since you can't start a
package name with a digit.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 7:56 PM, hiro <23hiro@googlemail.com> wrote:
> have you also seen this vid?
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s

Yes.

Russ