Google App Engine for Go

It looks like this is still going to be limited to HTTP (port 80) web applications.<p>So you won't be able to run a process like Doozer that communicates with other ports/protocols.<p>EDIT: More details from the docs at <a href="http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/runtime.html" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/runtime.html</a><p><i>An App Engine application cannot:<p>-write to the filesystem. Applications must use the App Engine datastore for storing persistent data. Reading from the filesystem is allowed, and all application files uploaded with the application are available.<p>-open a socket or access another host directly. An application can use the App Engine URL fetch service to make HTTP and HTTPS requests to other hosts on ports 80 and 443, respectively.</i>

This seems like a pretty big step to me: so far Go has seemed like a kind of geeky side project of Google's. But here they are promoting it into one of their production services.<p>Makes me wonder if they are preparing to slowly edge Java out the door and replace it with something equally performant but not burdened by a hostile owner.

The official blog post: <a href="http://blog.golang.org/2011/05/go-and-google-app-engine.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.golang.org/2011/05/go-and-google-app-engine.html</a><p>And Hacker News thread: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2533000" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2533000</a>

Any advantage (performance? memory use?) for using Go vs. Python? Or is just programming language preference?

Can anyone confirm if this allows linking native libraries? From the looks of the "compiler", it seems it might be hacked to produce a binary statically linked against, say, SpiderMonkey.<p>Beyond coolness, it seems a waste of effort to tailor this release to Go, when similar effort might have been expended, e.g. to define a simple protocol talked over a UNIX fd that any static x86 binary could implement to integrate with App Engine.

State my assumptions: GAE allows you to deploy multiple versions of your app and access the same datastore. Go should significantly out perform Python for certain CPU intensive tasks.<p>...<p>If Backends are available at <i>versioned</i> URLs too (and I suspect they do/willdo) then there might be nice opportunities to build little Go Backends to do heavy lifting within your main Python applications. Sounds cool.

Go appears to be gain more and more traction. I wonder how long before someone else supports it on their platform.

Great news! I'll start playing with it right away.<p>I won't drop Python for my day to day coding, but having Go as an option is good to see what cool toys we can build.

Go's a System language. Doesn't that mean it's more suitable for writing a web server, database, driver or OS than as a web site scripting language?<p>I mean, no one would write System code in PHP, and it's rare to see web sites written in C, so why write a website in Go?

What's the best way to get started with Google Go?

Nice of them to even mark the issue fixed!<p><a href="http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=2382" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=23...</a>

It's about time! i always wondered why google left out Go! for the app engine last time i was there, since it's their language and stuff. Tough i guess it's ruby next? yeah probably not...

Can't wait to toss Eclipse into the trash!

It's going to be a tough sale for Google to convince people to adopt Go for their web apps when Node.js is taking over that scene. With Node I get the best of two worlds: high concurrency and speed -- presumably the top two selling points for using Go with web apps -- without having to teach myself yet another programming paradigm. Everyone and their mother knows some Javascript; good luck hiring help for your Go-based startup.<p>IMHO, Google could be riding a much bigger wave right now...