Is it this?

(Editor's note:  don't get it?  ^^  See [1])

No, it is...

Gopher image is reproduced from work created and shared by Google and Renee French on golang.org page and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License.

What is golang? Or rather Go language? It is relatively young, conceived in 2007, released to public in 2009 and with go1 release in 2012, compiled statically typed garbage collected language designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson in Google. Still doesn't ring a bell. What about some recent projects using it. Have you heard about Openshift Origin, Kubernetes, Docker, Rkt, Etcd, Flannel, Hugo,... lots of "trending" projects are written in Go nowadays. You can find quite exhaustive, but definitely not complete list of "awesome" Go based projects here.

Why is that way?

Because some of those cool projects originate in Google? It is definitely a point to be noted, but the Go language have some interesting features on its own. Simple syntax, influenced by C. Lightweight concurrent goroutines, channels for communication between goroutines to help with concurrent programming. Simplified memory management thanks to concurrent mark and sweep garbage collector, but still offering pointer types(for reference passing). Implicit interface type system with no need to specify which interface is implement by type, "just implement it". Rather exhaustive standard library. No type inheritance rather embedding. Go doc, fmt, vet, pprof, CGO,... I have definitely missed some, but It is easy to start, "Go" :) and see tour for your self.

There are currently two implementation of Go language specification. Gc(aka Golang) written in Go(upcoming in version Go1.6) and GCC-Go an GCC frontend (GCC5, currently implementing go1.4).

Golang in Fedora?

Yes, Golang is there.

Both implementations are available in Fedora repositories. Golang(Gc) since Fedora 17 initially packaged by Adam Goode in version 1.1 and gcc-go since Fedora 15 in version of gcc 4.6.0(pre go1.0?, definitely not used much back then) packaged as part of gcc by GCC maintainers. Currently as for F22/F23 as golang-1.5.3 and gcc-5 and for upcoming F24 as golang-1.6 and gcc-6 respectively. Both implementation can be installed in parallel thanks to the Fedora alternatives.

Golang is built for all primary architectures x86_64, i686, and armv7hl. From secondary architectures golang is build for AArch64(aka 64-bit ARM) and it is built for both big endian and little endian 64-bit PowerPC.

Gcc-go is available on all Fedora architectures as gcc is, but experience might be varying as some architectures may not be fully supported by Golang and/or projects written in it.

From packaging point of view Go packaging guidelines are in state of draft (for discussion see) which are nearly complete. They are based around Jan Chaloupka's Gofed tool, which helps packager with general packaging and dependency management.

More information about golang in Fedora will come in upcoming series of posts.

[1] A photo of a game called "Go".

Last updated: September 19, 2023