Developers of the Eclipse Foundation's Golo language for the JVM are exploring improvements like concurrency models and improved runtime performance to boost the language's internet of things (IoT) development capability.
Golo, a simple, dynamic, weakly typed language favoring explicit over implicit, was born out of experiments by the Dynamid research team at the Center for Innovation in Telecommunications and Integration (CITI) Labs in France, project leader Julien Ponge said this week. The lab was interested in implementing dynamically typed languages on the JVM.
"Golo plays nicely with the larger JVM ecosystem and of course with the Java programming language itself. It is a simple functional-style language with a small runtime, and it yields reasonable performance for a dynamically typed language," Ponge said. "We've found that it works great for IoT experimentation."
The Golo team already is exploring concurrency and runtime improvements, and Ponge says Golo is a good base for language and runtime research. "We somehow validated this assumption through two short master student projects: ConGolo, for context-oriented programming, and HardenedGolo, for introducing some formal validation," he noted. Some derivative experiments may yield contributions back to Golo, and the team invites the community to "drive Golo to interesting directions," said Ponge.
The language is designed with the goal of keeping its internals simple and easy to understand. "The popular JVM languages have lots of merits in the field," said Ponge, "but their vast code bases can be intimidating, especially for students working with us on research projects."