go gopher

Go 1.4 was released today and I thought I would write about where I would like to see Google’s Go team dedicate some resources. By writing this, it’s my hope that it somehow manages to make its way back to Google and hopefully they can get to work on implementing a solution.

Go needs an IDE

If you’ve written any go code then you know that there isn’t any standard or even predominantly used development environment or IDE.  From what I’ve gathered by watching the go-nuts Google group and reading other blogs It seems that most people are using either Sublime or LiteIDE. I’ve tried both and can’t say that I’m a huge fan of either one.

I’m of the belief that a good IDE can simplify common tasks and dramatically improve a developers productivity.  At the same time I think a good IDE could rapidly accelerate the adoption of Go which would then lead to further improvements in both the amount and quality of go code.  If you take a look at two of Google’s other projects, Dart and Android you’ll notice that Google has created IDE’s for both, Dart Editor for Dart and Android Studio in the case of Android. In the case of Android Studio this seems to be a highly customized version of JetBrains InteliJ. While Dart Editor uses components from Eclipse. There is currently a plugin for InteliJ that adds some basic go support but I would love to have full-fledged IDE.  I understand that not everyone sees the benefit of an IDE but there are many developers that do. For those that do appreciate the benefits of an IDE this would be seen as a wonderful step forward for Go.

Go needs a working debugger

If you’ve tried to use GDB you know exactly what I’m talking about. GDB doesn’t work with Go.  Writing fmt.Printf everywhere is reminiscent of my early days working with PHP. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that would like to see a real working debugger for Go.

An IDE with a working integrated debugger would be a great addition to the Go community.