Tuesday, September 10, 2013

I really want to program in Go (for some reason)

I've done some work in my beloved Emacs but for larger programming projects I've really come to love Eclipse. The Java support is excellent and CDT works well. One of the great things about Eclipse is that there are plugins for many of my favorite things:

  1. AVR tools (so I can use a full-power IDE for Arduino)
  2. Google Web Toolkit and Google App Engine
  3. ANTLR integration. (I used this and GWT for WebLOGO)
  4. Android ADT 
So I wasn't that surprised to find a plugin for Go. It claims to be in a pretty early state. Here's how to get it. In Eclipse (I'm using 3.8) go to Help -> Install New Software and add the update site (http://goclipse.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/goclipse-update-site/). It installed cleanly in 3.8 for Ubuntu. Now there's a Go project type: 


Now what to do? I want to implement a B-tree in Go. The B-tree is interesting because I want to better understand how Go takes some of the work out of typing and polymorphism. This kind of thing usually drives you crazy in C++. Also, I'd like to implement iterators using Channels. My goal is to implement a few graph-search methods using B-trees to keep the fringe sorted.