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By spgennard, November 25, 2009 10:05 pm

Getting started with GO and vim

As a developer who lives most of his life on my Mac with vi/vim, I was happy to see the GO distribution includes vim colourisation for .go, files ..but it was installed.. so..

To setup this up, first copy $GOROOT/misc/vim/go.vim to your vim/gvim syntax directory or $HOME/.vim/syntax (see comment below for the mac). Then all that is required is to setup the file association in runtime/filetype.vim, the following lines did it for me..

If like me, you are using Vim.app on the mac, the runtime vim location will be Vim.app/Contents/Resources/vim/runtime with the syntax directory being below this too.

If all goes well, it should look like:

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By spgennard, November 24, 2009 11:21 pm

As someone who works with ‘C’, MSIL and Java bytecode to write system level software for our compilers and runtime, I was nicely surprised to see that someone has produced a new language aim at ‘System Level Programming’. Let me introduce you to ‘GO’ Googles new language and of course it is open source.

So why has google created the language? Well it is better to let Google themselves say why? (taken from their FAQ..)

No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends:

Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.

Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.

There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.

Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.

The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion.