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Comment by ed | Hacker News Reader

I've been thoroughly impressed watching web.go come together. It's now the top Go project on Github in every category they track: http://github.com/languages/Go

Personally I'm of the opinion that language expressiveness matters more than real world performance, but only to a limit. Go is definitely carving out a nice niche for performant systems-related apps.

And the fact that Smart Twitter serves 90k concurrent users from a VPS without breaking a sweat is freaking amazing. I suspect this is the reason the service can remain free.

(edit: err, for the "watched" categories)

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I just wanted to point out that it's not 90k concurrent users, but 90k total users (for some unknown definition of "user"). But it does process a couple dozen tweets per second according to him, with low load. That's quite a far ways off from 90k concurrent users. That's not to say that Go wouldn't help in that case, it really depends on what the application is doing.

I imagine at some point Google will make Go their fourth official language, when they perceive it is mature enough. I do hope they'll add a Go version of App Engine, as well.

It's Go on Android that I want...

It's getting there. Ken and Russ have been fixing a lot of the bugs I left behind in the arm compiler and it is passing most of the tests now. There is still work needed to get the API ported/linked but at least there is should be closure on the compiler front.

There's also quite a bit of interest from some of the Android guys internally, so I'm optimistic it'll continue to grow in that direction.

For those who don't know, "Ken" is Ken Thompson himself.

If they would retarget Go to a VM with advanced debugging, then it could subsume a lot of the advantages of languages like Python/Ruby/Smalltalk. Not only do those languages have fast turnaround times due to their dynamic nature, they also have "debugger on steroids" facilities like iPython, irb, and the Smalltalk image. If Go could replicate that facet as well, then dynamic environments wouldn't do anything significantly better than Go.

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