Thursday, April 5, 2012

EZ-Metrix measures Google's Go language

Several news stories emerged recently about Google's programming language called Go. Although Go has been around since 2007, it has gained credibility recently because of it's fast compilation, automatic semicolon insertion, multi-core CPU support and relatively simple syntax.

Background:
According to Wikipedia: "Go is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc. The initial design of Go was started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was officially announced in November 2009. In May 2010, Rob Pike publicly stated that Go was being used "for real stuff" at Google. Go's "gc" compiler targets theLinux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Microsoft Windows operating systems and the i386, AMD64, and ARM processor architectures."


Hello World sample code:
package main   
import "fmt" //text formatting package   
func main() {         
 fmt.Println("Hello, World") 
 }

Go and EZ-Metrix:
Because the Go language specification defines both a single-line comment delimiter (//) and a multi-line comment delimiter set (/*, */), EZ-Metrix has no trouble measuring the size of Go source code.

Conclusions:
If you're using Go on your next programming assignment (or inherited someone else's Go source), "Go" ahead and measure its size with EZ-Metrix. A free evaluation of EZ-Metrix is available at www.ez-metrix.com.

More:
Additional information about Go can be found at the official Go website: http://golang.org/