Enterprise users have likely had Go envy for some time. Since Google first introduced this high-performance language designed to replace C++ in 2007, it’s been an intriguing language for developers working on highly scalable and reliable systems. Today, however, ActiveState announced that it would be solving one of the biggest problems enterprises still have with Go.
ActiveGo will be available in beta form in February, said Jeff Rouse, director of product management at ActiveState, and the package will offer long-term support for the Go environment. That means developers in enterprises will be able to back up their Go applications with corporate support and services.
(Related: Google ships Go 1.7)
Rouse said that enterprises have trouble moving at the speed of a new language like Go. The biggest problem can simply be keeping up with fast-moving libraries. To that end, ActiveGo includes a number of packages that will be supported long term in their current versions, even if the upstream packages advance quickly in the coming years.
“The idea there is to address specific needs for the enterprise, things like curated packages, security, database connectivity, DevOps, and other areas enterprises feel are very important and feel they need a stricter environment and to have a particular flow for how often they take on language updates or version updates. We can support older versions for them,” said Rouse.
“The package itself has things around package management and dependency management, with projects like Glide to solve that issue. The problem is mostly unsolved in Go right now, but enterprises need the ability to have repeatable builds. They can’t just be grabbing packages off GitHub, for example.”
Additionally, the ActiveGo package includes cryptographic packages and database connectivity helpers. The Komodo IDE is also available to use with the Go language, with ActiveState planning to enhance this support even further over time.
For the future, Rouse said the ActiveGo team hopes to enhance search capabilities for Go source code. He also said that the team at ActiveState is considering just how far to push their support of Go libraries.
“It’s not something we’ve decided on exact strategy for yet,” said Rouse. “We’ve done that in the past, where we’ve provided compiled binaries and kept our own repository To begin with, we’ll likely just provide those in the distribution, but it really depends on how the community evolves there. They’ve got a good model going, and the only issue is around the dependencies of the packages.”
