[fineline]

But you can't deploy your Go to iOS. Or your Swift to Linux.

I'm getting interested in Nimrod (or Nim as I think it's planning to become). Compiles to native binaries via C, C++ or ObjectiveC. Even compiles to JavaScript. So it will run on all consumer and server platforms, on microcontrollers and in browser.

And it has generics, exceptions, macros, inheritance, and (optional, time-boxed) garbage-collection.

It's a tiny community which hasn't even managed to get a Wikipedia page to stay up, but I'm barracking for it.

[tagrun]

> But you can't deploy your Go to iOS.

And? iOS and Android supports are on their way in case you're not following recent developments. In case you're interested in writing programs for mobile devices, there's already a supporting go.mobile repository with (mainly targeting Android at the moment).

> And it has generics, exceptions, macros, inheritance, and (optional, time-boxed) garbage-collection.

Sigh... this "where's my feature!" argument almost always comes up.

It is not reasonable to expect that feature X that is very important to you has to carry the same weight for other people.

Some people think that it is unthinkable to write programs without feature X. If you think that way, then Go is probably not a language for you. Note however that there are many people who do not think that absence of feature X is a crippling thing, and do enjoy writing programs in Go.

> It's a tiny community [...]

in total contrast with... Nimrod community?

[fineline]

> Sigh... this "where's my feature!" argument almost always comes up.

I'll make it simple. Nimrod has one feature - only ONE - which differentiates it from Go. It's not generics, it's not inheritance, it's not proper error handling (cos they're all just fancy features which nobody really needs, right?), it's not even optional garbage collection (although that's a part of it, Go is not suitable for constrained real time applications because of its opinionated lack of optionality in this space).

It's REACH.

You know, the thing that has made JavaScript the most widely used language on the planet - and nobody's claiming THAT's got the greatest feature set.

> iOS and Android supports are on their way in case you're not following recent developments.

Yes I am, and the closest I came up with was this:

https://bitbucket.org/minux/goios/wiki/Home

Seriously? I mean, have you tried this? Have you even tried to make sense of the build instructions?

If you have the inside line on some secret Google plans for Go then good on you. But if you're going to make public claims like this - in a forum where people might be interested to hear about tools that help them DO cross-platform development rather than just dream about doing it one day - you should be prepared to back them up.

Challenge: you implement a cross platform library in Go, I'll do one in Nimrod, we'll upload working XCode and Android projects that use our shared library and that compile to App Store / Play Store eligible apps to Github. I'm up for it - are you?

[wutbrodo]

>> It's a tiny community

> in total contrast with... Nimrod community?

He _was_ referring to the Nimrod community here.

[pjmlp]

> OS and Android supports are on their way in case you're not following recent developments.

Yes, but it remains to be seen how Go's view on data structures map Objective-C and Java APIs.

As for Android support, the Android team doesn't seem to care any little bit about it, given their statements on Google IO.

So you have developers of a Google language trying to target a Google platform, where the platform owners just want to support Java (NDK is a kind of stepchild).

[enneff]

The rough shape the Go<->Java mapping has already been formed:

https://godoc.org/code.google.com/p/go.mobile/cmd/gobind

[pjmlp]

Thanks for pointing this out.

Even though I don't like some of Go's decisions, it would be nice to see it on Android. After all, I created the ticket request on Android Tools.

But the feedback at Google IO from Android's team in this regard was disappointing.

[mwcampbell]

Why do you want to see Go on Android? Yesterday, on the C++14 thread, you told me about why you gave up Turbo Pascal for C++ when you started programming for Windows 3.0 because you wanted to use a language officially supported by the OS vendor. If we apply that logic consistently, it seems to me that it would be best to just use Java on Android, unless you want to share code between platforms.

[pjmlp]

I agree, but sharing code between platforms is what I do, as I want to target both Android and Windows Phone on my hobby coding. So the common language winner to both SDKs is C++.

The ticket was created back when I was still into Go and was wishing for first level support on Android.

Still I think it would be nice if it would be supported for those that like the language.

[rsynnott]

> But you can't deploy your Go to iOS.

Well, you can if you MUST: https://bitbucket.org/minux/goios/wiki/Home

> Or your Swift to Linux.

I suspect that'll be a different story next year.

[swah]

But Go has Google.