Google has released a new programming language called Go. Interesting looking, and with its focus on concurrency, memory safety and super-fast build times, how long until someone writes a Rails clone in it that builds on demand and kicks Ruby on Rails’ ass on performance?

It’s nowhere near as clean looking as Ruby, more of a C meets Pascal type of thing, but you have to like a language whose Hello, World looks like this:

fmt.Printf(“Hello, 世界\n”)

UTF-8 encoded source files and UTF-8 strings from the get go (no pun intended). Cool stuff.

Update: Funny source commit from UNIX-legend Ken Thompson. Thompson was asked once if there’s anything he would have liked to do differently in UNIX and replied that he would have spelled the creat() system call with an ‘e’. Looks like he got a second chance in GO. The commit message reads:

spell it with an “e” open Go Google, Go