Go (golang)

Because it is moderately well-known and well-liked, Go (also called Golang) gets its own chapter.

Good for:

writing internet servers (todo cite). efficient, concurrency, statically-linked executable.

Attributes:

Pros:

Compiles fast
- Simple grammar
  - "Compared to other languages in the C family, its grammar is modest in size, with only 25 keywords (C99 has 37; C++11 has 84; the numbers continue to grow). More important, the grammar is regular and therefore easy to parse (mostly; there are a couple of quirks we might have fixed but didn't discover early enough)." -- https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
  - "Unlike C and Java and especially C++, Go can be parsed without type information or a symbol table; there is no type-specific context" -- https://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
- Separate compilation (todo)
Gofmt
Produces a single statically-linked executable.
Structurally typed interfaces
Relatively efficient memory usage compared to many high-level languages
named return values [1]
M:N mapped goroutines (by 'M:N mapped' i mean that Go can start multiple threads and migrate goroutines among them so that if a goroutine blocks, the other goroutines aren't blocked; this is in contrast to having all Goroutines on one thread, or to 1:1 mapping (where each goroutine would have its own OS thread))
- these are semi-premptive; the programmer doesn't have to explicitly yield, rather the Go runtime will yield at various places, such as function calls; but it is possible to go into a tight loop in which case the Go runtime never yields

Cons:

Lack of fine-grained control over memory management
- Bills itself as a 'systems programming language' however does not allow the programmer fine-grained control over memory management, instead providing mandatory garbage collection. Many commentators who use C++ instead of Go say that the lack of fine-grained control over memory management is what is keeping them from using Go instead of C++, and prevent Go from being a true 'systems programming language' (see various comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417859 ).
No generics
No dynamic linking
No exceptions (more of a best practice than a language constraint though)
Compiler error to have unused variables and imports -- this can make it cumbersome to experiment and debug, as you have to comment out unused stuff
No scheduler preemption as of this writing (Aug 2013), but they're working on it
Multiprocess Go programs can use data races to gain access to unsafe pointer manipulation, meaning that sandboxed systems (such as App Engine) must restrict their users to single-threaded Go. See http://research.swtch.com/gorace

Tours and tutorials:

Feature lists and discussions and feature tutorials:

Overviews:

Best practices:

Library highlights:

Respected exemplar code:

proj-plbook-plChGoLang