I’ve been recently interested in Go, a new programming language.

The best way to learn a language is to use it in a small but real project.

I needed a program that generates HTML from textile format. The way of least resistance would be to implement it in Python, as I’ve coded a similar thing in the past. Instead I decided to use this as an opportunity to get more familiar with Go.

The biggest part of the problem was the textile to HTML conversion. There is no existing Go code for that so I decided to port upskirt C library, as it does the job in the most performant way (it has a hand-written, disciplined parser as opposed to most other solutions that just throw cryptic regular expression at the problem).

The bottom line is: porting C code, at least in this case, was fast, boring, mechanical process (and that is a good thing).

Go’s syntax is heavily inspired by C. The differences that I’ve encountered most frequently:

Fortunately, the transformations were simple and mostly mechanical.

It took me just few days to manually translate around 4000 lines of C code into ~3200 lines of Go code.

Saving ~800 lines of code (20%) is good, but the interesting part is: where do the savings come from?

The core parsing/html generating logic didn’t shrink much. The big savings came from the fact that Go has a built-in growable array type and upskirt C code had to spend 924 lines re-implementing that in C.

An unexpected advantage of Go was its safety. The C code implements parsing by partying on char * pointers. Such code is notorious for causing lots of subtle, hard to test for bugs. Go doesn’t allow this kind of pointer arithmetic and instead provides slices, which are a view into an underlaying array.

Slices provide out-of-bounds checks. Just by recoding in Go I found out-of-bounds access bug in the original C code.

Thanks to similarity of Go and C syntax, porting algorithmic code from C is simple.

All things considered, Go is quickly becoming my new preferred language (taking the crown away from Python). It combines the good attributes of Python (lightweight syntax, garbage collection) with good attributes of C (fast execution thanks to compilation to native code and programmer’s control over memory layout) and adds some unique capabilities of its own (concurrency via gorutines and channels).

BTW: if you want markdown implementation for Go, use blackfriday. It’s also direct port of upskirt and I abandoned my port in favor of contributing to blackfriday, since it was slightly ahead and there’s no need for two nearly identical projects.