Yesterday, the Go programming language announced their second stable release, introducing language changes, better packages, and general speed-ups. I’m proud to say that I helped out in a small part by contributing a patch to the zlib package.

For those of you who haven’t heard me talk about Go, it’s a programming language that brings all of the pleasant features from scripting languages and mixes it with the simplicity of C. Its syntax and feel is unlike any other language, but after a week, it begins to feel like second nature, and it’s now one of the first languages I grab to solve a problem. I can’t say enough good things about it, and if you haven’t already, download it and try the tutorial. (And yes, it will feel weird at first. Give it a week if you’re coming in fresh.)

I’m also excited that the next weekly will include my implementation of the SPDY protocol — Google’s improvement to the HTTP protocol — as one of the standard packages! The Go development team is exceptionally friendly and open to contributions, and I must say, this is the most fun open source project I’ve worked on. If you want a fun open source project to help out with, start hanging out on the go-nuts mailing list.

Congratulations to Russ and everyone involved on a successful release!