Going to http://www.startpage.com/ redirects you to the https version.

As an interesting aside, this is from the FAQ page:

On July 14th 2008 Ixquick received the first European Privacy Seal from European Data Protection Supervisor Mr. Peter Hustinx. The Seal officially confirms the privacy promises we make to our users. It makes Ixquick the first and only EU-approved search engine. Both EU Commissioner Viviane Reding and Dr.Thilo Weichert, German Privacy Commissioner complemented Ixquick on its privacy achievements. You can find the press release here.

So... the EU wants privacy, but also wants to monitor everything you do? What a strange place.

- It has been in development for almost 5 years, the team is completely different than Champions
- Character animation looks pretty good to me, but what a minor thing to complain about. It'll get better over time too. I could personally care less if it uses ASCII graphics, as long as the gameplay is solid
- Klingon faction is currently mostly PVP -- they want to add more content later. Big deal! In fact, some players will like this.
- There's a lot more going on than just tank / healer / etc. You can equip modules in any way you want to give your ship a versatile configuration. Seam with team members for away missions. It may not be the most revolutionary game around but, it does do something different. I for one look forward to trying out the strategic space combat.
- It's only microtransaction in the same way that WoW is. You can buy items that don't really affect the gameplay.
- Initial reviews and impressions are much more positive than with Cryptic's previous offerings.
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Who knows, maybe it will suck, maybe it won't. We don't know yet.

You can not, with C++, add functions to classes at runtime like you can with Objective-C. You can not, with C++, change the access properties of a particular class instantiation (ie change a method from public to private) at runtime like you can with Java.

You're clearly a C++-centric programmer who fails to understand that the more tools in your belt, the better. Every language has its use. C++ is an awesome language, for specific purposes, just like Java is (for specific purposes), same with Python, and Ruby, and many other languages.

No language is without its faults either.

That doesn't mean anything. Neither is Java. And neither is obj-c. Yet they're both languages that can be compiled to machine code, are dynamically bound, and are capable of providing runtime reflection. It's all about how it's implemented and the runtime.

Your queue class is of no relation to Gochannels whatsoever. You're omitting the Goroutines, which you simply can not ignore. They do not equate to simple threads. Take a look at the Go channel source and you'll understand better what they're actually doing.

Runtime reflection, true closures (something not offered any very many other compiled languages), array slices, and a built in parallel programming paradigm certainly justify at least giving it a thought for a very select category of problems.

I'm up for considering anything if it will save time / money / hassle. If it doesn't, oh well, move on to the next tool. Whatever fits!

I should also mention that I'm no Google or Go fanboy. I'm actually a C++ compiler developer by trade so I've no beef with C++ either. In fact I love C++. I love many languages. My thesis was written in D, for example. I've also written commercial applications in Python, Ruby, Erlang, etc, etc.

For me, the jury is still out on Go. I'm not convinced the world needs YAL (yet another language), but I'm open to the idea. If they find a niche for it, great.

I agree with all your "negatives", but you clearly have a C++ centric viewpoint on Go. I think it's more valuable to look at it without bias.

While it's true that the dynamic binding has a negative performance impact, it's also true that this offers some design flexibility that you can't get in C++.

It's clear that performance isn't the key concern of Go; it seems like they're aiming more for convenience and rapid development speed.

Sometimes it's hard for C++ programmers to think beyond type safety but once you shift your mind into say Python or Ruby mode (languages even more dynamic and less type safe than Go), you can still write safe code.

But like I said I do agree with you, that your negatives are indeed negatives. I just want to point out that there are positives there too, and we should be looking at every language with an eye of "what specific problem can this tool be used to solve." rather than "how can I use tool X to solve the same problems I solved with tool Y" -- which is something C++ programmers can fall into easily since it's without a doubt one of the most flexible, powerful, and multi-paradigm languages out there.

As for your 30 LOC Gochannel... don't forget that a Goroutine is not just a thread. Multiple Goroutines are multiplexed across many threads and the Gochannel.

I should also like to point out that the C code for _just_ the platform agnostic channel code (after all the os specific threading functions have been abstracted away) in Go is 1035 lines long as of changeset 3975. Nor does this include the Goroutine code.