Go language reaches release candidate stage
Google engineer Andrew Gerrand has announced release candidate 1 of the open source Go programming language. With this release, the language is nearing its first stable version.
According to Gerrand, a few documentation issues and "a handful of bugs" still need to be addressed before Go 1 can be released with the "stable" tag, but code written in this version of the language "should be completely unaffected" by any changes still to come. Users of Google's App Engine service will soon be getting a beta SDK to test as well. The team's focus following this release will be on fixing critical issues with the language itself, all other bugs and feature requests have been deemed non-essential until Go 1 is released.
Go is aimed mostly at systems programmers and was originally created in 2008 with the goal of combining the development speed of dynamic languages such as Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. The language's design was spearheaded by Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer out of frustration with existing languages for systems programming and quickly attracted contributions from within Google.
The Go programming language can be downloaded for both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD as explained in detailed installation instructions on the project's web site. The Go source code is available under a BSD-style licence.
See also:
- Go is go for Google's App Engine, a report from The H.
- Google's Go programming language, a report from The H.
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