Episode 18: Go

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News

• Color printing reaches its ultimate end 100,000 dpi
• http://www.nature.com/news/colour-printing-reaches-its-ultimate-resolution-1.11159
• http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second.html
• Joyent Cloud ending Lifetime accounts
• https://plus.google.com/u/0/112783391065033208484/posts/16WyAvu37wE
• Apple Buys Fingerprint Scanning/Security Company
• http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-fingerprint-technology-apple-20120816,0,3535378.story
• Twitter Caps 3rd Party Apps
• http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/twitter-apps-idUSL2E8JH03I20120817

Tool of the Biweek

• Jason:  Gnucash http://www.gnucash.org/
• Patrick: 7-zip http://www.7-zip.org/, p7zip http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/

Go

History

• Co-routines become popular
• Stackless Python
• Ruby
• Effective Go
• http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html
• Go 1.0 released
• http://blog.golang.org/2012/03/go-version-1-is-released.html

Features

• Goroutines: lightweight threads
• A typical computer can only handle a few hundred regular threads per app.
• Effectively infinite goroutines per app
• Channels: concurrent queues
• Garbage Collection (Safe Pointers)

Strengths

• Fast
• Designed to scale in parallelism easily
• Obfuscates dealing with threads, threadpools, etc.

Weaknesses

• No Generics
• Not yet established
• Few bindings

Tools

• Go Compilers
• go: faster compile, slower runtime
• gccgo: slower compile, faster runtime
• Organizing Go code
• http://blog.golang.org/2012/08/organizing-go-code.html 

Uses

• Systems programming