Go

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Revision as of 15:14, 24 August 2010 by Rsaarelm (talk | contribs) (Remove the note about FFI binary distribution problems, the issue seems to have been resolved in more recent versions of Go)
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Go is a programming language announced by Google in November 2009. It is a native-code compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent language. The design idea seems to be to make a modernized version of C.

Roguelike Issues

Go has several modern programming features, such as garbage collection and closures, which help when developing roguelikes. It has a reasonably simple duck-typing-based object system, which is clean, but doesn't necessarily match the complex problem of roguelike data modeling. The concurrent features aren't much needed in main roguelike logic, which is generally very sequential, but can help when programming an user interface that runs asynchronously with the game logic.

Go supports Linux, BSD and OS X, but as of 2010-01, the Go build environment has not been completely ported to Windows. It has two compilers, gc, and a gcc front-end gccgo. As of 2010-01, gccgo doensn't support garbage collection, and therefore isn't a viable compiler for a long-running Go program such as a computer game.

There is FFI support for linking to external C libraries like SDL or Curses. Calling C code from Go is reasonably straightforward.

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