Guest post by Today we announce Go 1.4, the fifth major stable release of Go, arriving six months after our previous major release Go 1.3. It contains a small language change, support for more operating systems and processor architectures, and improvements to the tool chain and libraries. As always, Go 1.4 keeps the promise of compatibility, and almost everything will continue to compile and run without change when moved to 1.4.
Of course, this release is all about Android, even though it’s just experimental support. The pace of Go library support for Android within Google is just staggering.
The plan should be obvious: kill off Java and reliance on Oracle cruft (and legal issues) and get much better performance while at it.
Interesting times.
Works for me! Esp if they let you build Chrome apps with it.
Sorry to spoil your fun, but the Android team doesn’t share the same view as the Go team.
They explicitly stated at this year’s Google IO that Java is the only language to be officially supported on Android.
For your amusement, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3meJyiYWFw
What else can they say at this year’s IO? Of course they can’t spill the beans until it is official. Getting rid of Java is in Google’s interest in so many ways.
Sure, that is why they just released Android Studio.
Exercise, look at Android documentation and think how to map the inheritance, nested classes, enumerations, method overloading and generics that are used everywhere into Go semantics.
They won’t.
For application development is Java years ahead of Go (parametrized types…).
There is ton of Java developers, only some Go devs
Removing Java compatibility would piss off majority of Android developers. Keeping it doesn’t solve legal problems.
It’s lots of work, that solves almost no real problems.
It’s kind of hard to rewrite everything in Go.That’s why they made ART, a Java runtime which compiles everything to native code before running apps.
Go will have its use cases, for sure. It’s designed as being a “systems language” so it will be possible some time, when it matures and gains more performance, to use it for the stuff we use C and C++ today. But Go is much more than that, it can be used to write web apps, for instance.
And with Google’s weight behind it, it just might take over.
Edited 2014-12-12 20:18 UTC
It’s designed as an application language.
Rust is designed as a system language and does a much better job in replacing C/C++ (although it’s not there yet).
They will have a very good java killer if they wrap webm/vp8-9 and aura with go. Go works with snappy and webp I think.