Microsoft is giving back to the Go programming community with the announcement of Project Athens and GopherSource. According to the company, this is an important milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to support Go in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Team Services and Azure cloud platform.
Project Athens is an open-source project designed to create proxy servers for Go modules. The project includes a Go module proxy server for edge deployments, a protocol for authenticated module proxies, module notary services, and the ability to specify what to include and exclude when approving external Go packages.
The company explained the project is still in its alpha phase, and will continue work on improving the modules experience.
GopherSource is a new initiative designed to bring more users and contributors to the Go ecosystem and “upstream” key Go projects. “The Go community is renowned for its cute gopher mascot and friendly figureheads, but it can still be a confusing and intimidating area to jump into for new and experienced developers alike,” Aaron Schlesinger, developer advocate at Microsoft Azure, wrote in a post. “By encouraging the Go community’s own talented developers to contribute to upstream Go, we ensure that the Go ecosystem will meet the needs of the entire community.”
Additionally, Microsoft is working to improve the Go developer experience within its own products and services. Some improvements include an extension for native Go support in Visual Studio Code, support for Go across Azure services, and CI and CD capabilities for Go apps in Visual Studio Team Services.
