back to article Google Go boldly goes where no code has gone before

Every Google data center has a Chubby, and Heroku wanted one too. Like the rest of Google's much admired back-end infrastructure, Chubby is decidedly closed source, so Heroku men Keith Rarick and Blake Mizerany built their own. Although they didn't have source code, they did have one of those secret-spilling Google research …

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  1. JDX Gold badge

    Bill & Ted

    Every Google data centre has a full-on robot chubby.

  2. Solomon Grundy
    Badgers

    Chubby and the Goo Girl

    Great name for a movie that.

    Also the Matrixy Symantec ad is horrible.

  3. Mme.Mynkoff
    Thumb Up

    Fascinating article

    Nicely done.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    one awful bit: the implied ;

    Go is sweet. It's like stackless python but fast and with a lower memory footprint. However there is one thing IME which is wrong with the language: the designers didn't like the way C and company require a ; between each statement, and so they made it optional in Go. The rule is that if a ; could be placed before an end-of-line and things still parse then act as if the ; had been there all along. That makes statements like

    x = 10

    look nice. But

    if (x == 10)

    body

    is dangerous because the compiler realizes it could put a ; after the ), and does so, with obvious incorrect results.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Pint

      Interesting; But what about

      if (x==10) {

      body

      }

      But I must confess i havn't tried to touch GO yet (but if it has C roots), just seems a logical solution to the problem you outlined. If that is the case then I for one welcome this new mental coffee.

      1. nsd

        yes that's the the only way it works

        Yes explicitly putting the {} and making sure the { is on the same line as the if statement works as expected. However the other three common "C" layouts fail: the one I mentioned above, the { on the next line, and the body on the same line as the if. I don't like C-like unless it is really C-like. Somewhat close trips me up.

        Go also missed the "indentation is information" boat which python, haskell (and others I don't know--Eiffel I think) got right, IMO. It enforces that the code be pretty. That isn't nice for generated code, but great for humans.

        Still despite its faults it's very nice for multi-threaded code, server or otherwise.

        1. Sandtreader

          Language enforces K&R shock

          Oh damn, I was getting interested until you said that. So "ANSI" bracing is out? C syntax may not be optimal but it is automatic to millions of programmers...

  5. Graham Bartlett

    "built-in mechanisms for running concurrent tasks"

    So - like Occam2 then? He who doesn't learn from the past is doomed to re-implement it from scratch...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "built-in mechanisms for running concurrent tasks"

      Uh? They mention Hoare's CSP in the article, and Pike and pals have done several generations of concurrent programming languages.

      He who doesn't read the article properly is doomed to comment on it without understanding the context of certain remarks.

  6. The Fuzzy Wotnot
    Happy

    Doozer!

    That's cute! Same as the little builders on Fraggle Rock!

  7. Eddie Edwards
    Thumb Up

    Slight nitpick

    Node.js doesn't have a user-visible event loop; it uses callbacks.

    Otherwise, bang on.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This is possibly stupid

    but can anyone explain how that function works in the Go Fibonacci Closure code snippet?

    1. Sandtreader
      Boffin

      Reaching closure

      It's a long-winded way of doing Fibonacci but a nice-ish way of demonstrating closures. The fib() function doesn't actually do anything, it returns a function which can be asked to do so something later. a and b act rather like globals and are held in a 'closure' attached to the function object returned by fib(). Each call of this function (which gets assigned to 'f' in the main()) modifies a and b. The double assignment is a trick to calculate both right-hand sides before assigning them to new values of a and b, which gives you a kind of two-element queue, which is what you need for calculating Fibonacci. HTH.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    First stab

    So a and b exist throughout the life of the call "println()"? That would explain

    set a = b

    set b = a+b

    and the next function call actually taking those values into account.

    If you run

    println( fib(),fib(),f(),f())

    instead, you get

    0xf84000b040 0xf84000b080 1 2

    Two function "addresses" I'd assume...

    Try it all out here. http://golang.org/

    I've typed it already if you care to copy and paste:

    package main

    func fib() func() int {

    a, b := 0,1

    return func() int {

    a,b = b, a+b

    return b

    }

    }

    func main() {

    f := fib()

    println( fib(),fib(),f(),f())

    }

    WTF...because I'm thick :)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Cheers but...

      it looks to me like the line

      a, b := 0,1

      is always assigning a and b to equal 0 and 1 every time the function is called.

      1. Sandtreader
        Boffin

        That's a fib

        No, fib() is only called once. It's the function it returns, called 'f' in main() which is called repeatedly, modifying a and b each time.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Thumb Up

          the sound that you hear

          is the echo of the penny dropping in the cavern that is my empty mind. Thanks to those that responded; I understand now.

  10. C. Fuhrman
    Boffin

    Does Go make it easier to program bug-free concurrent code?

    One of the biggest problems with concurrent programming is writing code that is free of deadlocks, livelocks, race conditions, etc.

    There's no mention of how Go makes this easier, so I'm guessing it doesn't?

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