News

AWS To Add Go Programming Language SDK

• By David Ramel
• January 30, 2015

Developers working with the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud will be able to use the Go programming language after a little more work is done on the project, the company said yesterday.

Go is actually being added to the AWS stable of SDKs because the company took over a third-party project it happened to notice will researching customer requests.

Though the open source Go language was created by cloud services rival Google Inc., AWS exec Peter Moon said his company had received requests to add the language to join the current portfolio of Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP and Objective-C SDKs and began to look into the idea.

Upon researching the issue, AWS noticed the "aws-go" SDK project from a company named Stripe.

"This SDK, principally authored by Coda Hale, was developed using model-based generation techniques very similar to how our other official AWS SDKs are developed," Moon said in a blog post yesterday. "We reached out and began discussing possibly contributing to the project, and Stripe offered to transfer ownership of the project to AWS. We gladly agreed to take over the project and to turn it into an officially supported SDK product."

It will be an experimental project on GitHub while AWS collects feedback, with the goals of hardening APIs, increasing test coverage, and adding some key new features such as request retries, checksum validation and hooks to request lifecycle events, Moon said.

Go is described by Wikipedia as "a statically typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collection, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library."

Go 1.0 was released in March 2012 and updated to version 1.4 earlier this month with official support for Google's Android OS.

Developers can provide feedback on the GitHub site.