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Google launches Go runtime for App Engine

It's a Go for SDK 1.5.2

Google has released a Go runtime for Google App Engine, adding that homegrown platform-as-a-service specialist programming language to the Python and Java runtimes already available.

"This means you can take that Go app you've been working on (or meaning to work on) and deploy it to App Engine right now with the new 1.5.2 SDK," writes Google engineer Andrew Gerrand in a post on – where else? – The Go Programming Language Blog.

By "right now," of course, Gerrand means right after you download the SDK, which is available in 64-bit and 32-bit versions for Linux and Mac OS X. Of course, if you're not familiar with Go and the Google App Engine, it might also be a good idea to first peruse Google's Getting Started docs.

But don't expect completely smooth sailing. As Gerrand points out: "Note that the Go runtime is still considered experimental; it is not as well-supported as the Python and Java runtimes."

Google touts Go as "expressive, concise, clean, and efficient," and describes it as "a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language."

When Google promised the runtime's release this May at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, one of Go's creators, Rob Pike, told The Reg: "For large programming – programming in the large, like we do at Google, using large systems with many programmers working on them – static [typing] is a huge safety net. It catches tons of stuff early that would not be caught with all-dynamic typing.

"Go is a real systems language, a compiled language. You can write really efficient code that runs closer to the metal. But you can use ... higher-level ideas to build servers out of the pieces you put together," he said.

And now that the runtime is out of beta, you can use Go to tap into the Google App Engine online service, and run Go apps on top of Mountain View's massively distributed infrastructure.

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