For my purposes, Go's standard library has proved as complete as Python's (http://docs.python.org/library/index.html) and includes some things that the Python standard library doesn't (e.g., crypto, graphics), all the more impressive IMO considering how relatively young Go is.
Wow these are significant changes! The entire development process has been cleaned up significantly, and not having to use Makefiles is a significant improvement, as well as default error type. Go team is dedicated to developers and developer process and it will pay off.
Agreed, this sort of attention to tooling and the more menial parts of the development experience is sorely amiss among many other contenders, and definitely makes Go appear more interesting to me.
Looks like Go is cleaning up. Love the language, but I won't commit to writing heavy-duty code in it until it either has sensible union support or sensible generic support. The type system is just too weak right now.
I actually thought that to start with but when you get used to the frankly wierd type system, it actually works extremely well without generics (bear in mind I use C# which is heavily generic programming). When you approach the problems with a Go mindset, I don't think I've found a single case that needed generic types.
I'm not sure of the value of unions now or ever as it brings what is effectively a compiler decision into user space and allows very unsafe, architecture dependent code to be accidentally written.
A "tagged union" which is what I assume you mean is usually abstracted as a native type (struct) in other langauges (Go included). C gives you architecture level access to it. Go leaves it to the VM to decide.
Yep, there are some Go services at Google that handle a staggering amount of traffic. I hope to be able to discuss one of the services publicly later this year. (Yeah, confidentiality is a drag.)
They Go App Engine team have also very recently pushed out beta releases that are tracking the weekly Go releases leading up the final Go 1 release, so I think it's safe to say that Go will be officially supported on App Engine not too long after Go 1 is released.
All the information required to build a go package is in the source. why write and maintain Make files when they are unnecessary? The Go project is all about making programming simpler.
I'm using it to build a world server for a multiplayer game. A lot of people suggest Scala/Java, Erlang, or Node.js for this, but I'm using Go. Go has a good, efficient memory model that lets me simulate a heck of a lot more of my world per megabyte of RAM. In today's world of hosting, that translates into a huge impact on how many dollars per user/hour we need to pay to run our game. That can have a direct translation into what kinds of business models can, and cannot, work for a game design. I've actually written rudimentary versions of my world server in all of the languages I mentioned above, and Go is by far the best in terms of what I can do with memory.
Go makes it very easy to communicate between nodes, almost as easy as what you can do in Erlang. Doozer is a library in Go for coordination of the activities of many machines, a lot like Zookeeper. Between Doozer and Netchan, Go is a really solid choice for making a system like a world simulator that needs to be distributed among many computers.
Go is also better than Node.js for things that require manipulating binary data. For example, I have some communications back and forth where the server is in Go, the client is in Python, and they talk using Protocol Buffers. Javascript doesn't do binary (at all? not very well?) like Go or Java can. There is an experimental protocol buffer library in Javascript, but in general Javascript needs to kind of bend over backwards to work with binary data. It's possible to do it, but it's not natural or efficient.
In general, if you care about memory usage, working with binary data, tons of simultaneous threads/actors, building distributed systems, then Go is a great choice, especially if you want to do more than one of the above.
Used it for my Master's thesis research. It turned out pretty well; Go hits a sweet spot between systems programming and higher-level languages. Anecdotally, it performed about 2/3 as fast as C in stress tests, which was easily worth the productivity boost (especially GC).
I chose it because the native code interface is so nice, so it's trivial to use libraries like ZeroMQ without the overhead you'd see out of something like JNI.
I'm using it to do http traffic analysis on captured packets... about 2.5 million packets a second at peak. This is to provide realtime charts for our web service which didn't have realtime reporting hooks.
I am also using it for HTTP request reconstruction and retransmission in real-time to enable live-data and full load testing of pre-production code.
soon to be launch a vertical content repository, purely GO code (leveldb inspired database with fulltext, ranking and highly scalable, crawler, webserver, load balancer, etc.) with only dependency being libxml2.
Used it experimentally to port a python tool that does some log aggregation with several options (read backwards, query on fields, etc) and returns the results in JSON.
A straight line by line port (ie less idiomatic Go) runs at about twice the speed of Python and with the same memory footprint. With the right fine tuning should be even better.
It was also very easy to do -- i.e code translated quite easily from Python to Go.
1. language designed with good intentions (http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#What_is_the_purpose_of_the...)
2. designed and built by a group of veteran system researchers and engineers (ie. not javascript)
3. implementation open sourced from the start: http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse
4. not overdesigned (http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#Design)
5. a real and practical abstraction for multicore computing (http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf)
Its success, like most languages, will depend on library support. Here's hoping it catches on.