Go Quicksort

Around when the Google programming langauge Go came out I caught wind of it and decided to try it out a little bit. I never ended up doing much with it, though I found it interesting, but thought it’s OOP model was too different for me to use. But one of the first things I did do was write a concurrent Quicksort using their concurrency natives, goroutines. I was astonished at how easy it was considering how much more difficult it is (and how much more code it takes) in C++. The performance also blew me away. Recently I’ve been getting interested in Go again, and decided to revisit my old quicksort implementation, which I still had archived on an old hard drive. I made some adjustments and came up with this:

Using the Go Sandbox I was astonished to find that this both compiled and then ran and sorted an array of 10,000 random integers in less than 2 seconds. I wouldn’t be able to get the same results in any other language (except Erlang, if I knew it better).

When I first started playing with Go a couple of years ago I was still deeply a C++ and Python programmer, and was so set in my Class-based OOP ways. Since then I’ve become something of a JavaScript Junkie and have opened up to different methods of Object Oriented Programming. Coming back to Go I find it not as frustratingly different and confusing as before. Instead I’m finding it to be an extremely satisfying way to write efficient systems. I’ve started on a simple load balancer for one of my current projects using Go, and it is surprisingly easy.

I think Go is definitely the C/C++ of the future. It keeps the safe, fast feel of C and C++, while being more modern and easier to use, and not nearly as fickle. Anyone with any experience in C-like languages or even scripting languages like Python should find Go easy to learn. They even have a tool on their home page for you to try Go without installing it, I’d encourage trying it out.