Google announced the launch of a runtime version of Go for the Google App Engine. Go is a platform-as-a-service specialized programming language in the same category as Java and Python. Both these latter languages have runtimes already available for theGoogle App Engine.
According to Google engineer Andrew Gerrand’s post on the Go Programming Language Blog, “This means you can take that Go app you’ve been working on (or meaning to work on) and deploy it to App Engine right now with the new 1.5.2 SDK.”
Well, not exactly “right now.” You’d have to get the SDK first by downloading it. The developer kit has 2 versions, 64-bit and 32-bit, forMac OS X and Linux. If you need to get up to speed on Google App Engine and Go, you might want to first check out Google’s docs on getting started.
Although the Go release is quite exciting and broadens the runtime library of Google App Engine, it isn’t exactly polished yet. As Gerrand wrote: “Note that the Go runtime is still considered experimental; it is not as well-supported as the Python and Java runtimes.” Why? Go is Google’s “homebrewed” language and it is still relatively novel. Google has championed this internally developed languageto fulfill its vision of an “expressive, concise, clean, and efficient” language. Google touts Go as “a fast, statically typed, compiledlanguage that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.”
Go was originally announced in May at San Francisco’s Google I/O conference. During the release, Rob Pike, one of Go’s inventors, said”For large programming – programming in the large, like we do at Google, using large systems with many programmers working onthem – static [typing] is a huge safety net. It catches tons of stuff early that would not be caught with all-dynamic typing.
“Go is a real systems language, a compiled language. You can write really efficient code that runs closer to the metal. But you can use …higher-level ideas to build servers out of the pieces you put together,” he said.
Give Go a spin and tap into massively distributed computing infrastructure of Google through the Google App engine service.
And share your thoughts in the comments below…We are looking forward to hearing your opinion.