I think it’s valuable for game developers to know of a broad range of programming techniques and tools, and programming languages are one of our fundamental tools that strongly dictate how we phrase answers to the problems that we’re solving. With this in mind, I’d like to introduce Go, a language created by Google mainly for creating web services.

What is Go?

  • Strongly typed (with dynamic casting), compiled language, garbage collected
  • Made by Google for their servers, based on pragmatically solving problems
  • Really good at concurrent stuff, pretty fast
  • Designed to be productive (similar to Python, “batteries included” standard library)
  • Structural interfaces, not inheritance
  • Public /private by capitalization
  • Built in unit testing, benchmarking, profiling, building, documentation server
  • Compiles fast, cross platform

Website: http://golang.org

I think that the go tour on the official website is a really cool way to have a look at this language without having to install anything. Be sure to pay closest attention to goroutines and channels, since they’re the fundamental building block.

Good introductions / tutorials: