Difference between revisions of "Go"
(Updated info for 2012, we now have a stable v1 and it runs on Windows) |
(Changed the "better C" thing, which was my interpretation. The devs have said that Go is a response to C++.) |
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'''Go''' is a programming language announced by Google in November 2009. It is a native-code compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent language | '''Go''' is a programming language announced by Google in November 2009. It is a native-code compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent language, born from the developers' frustration with developing concurrent server applications with C++. Version 1 of Go was released in March 2012, and should be a stable target for future applications. | ||
== Roguelike Issues == | == Roguelike Issues == | ||
Revision as of 11:52, 22 July 2012
Go is a programming language announced by Google in November 2009. It is a native-code compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent language, born from the developers' frustration with developing concurrent server applications with C++. Version 1 of Go was released in March 2012, and should be a stable target for future applications.
Roguelike Issues
Go has several modern programming features, such as garbage collection and closures, which help when developing roguelikes. It has a reasonably simple duck-typing-based object system, which is clean, but doesn't necessarily match the complex problem of roguelike data modeling. The concurrent features aren't much needed in main roguelike logic, which is generally very sequential, but can help when programming an user interface that runs asynchronously with the game logic.
Go has two compilers, the standalone gc one and a GCC front-end gccgo. The official GCC distribution has included the Go front end since version 4.6. The gc toolchain supports Linux, BSD, OS X and Windows on x86-32 or x86-64. As of 2012-07, there is some ARM support, but it's unclear how feasible developing Go applications for ARM devices running Android would be.
There is FFI support for linking to external C libraries like SDL or Curses. Calling C code from Go is reasonably straightforward.