Go, a programming language developed by Google, has just reached version 1.4. One of the milestones achieved by this release is support for writing simple Android apps:
The most notable new feature in this release is official support for Android. Using the support in the core and the libraries in the golang.org/x/mobile repository, it is now possible to write simple Android apps using only Go code. At this stage, the support libraries are still nascent and under heavy development. Early adopters should expect a bumpy ride, but we welcome the community to get involved.
At the moment however, the mobile APIs offered are centered around OpenGL and sprite-drawing, making it more suitable for writing games. In the long run, Google plans to support the NDK API, which means that it will not be a complete replacement for Java, but can be useful for writing native code in a safer and more productive language than C++.
According to the documentation page, iOS support is planned as well.
If you have not tried out Go before, it is a statically typed, garbage-collected language that arose from Google’s experience in writing and maintaining large code bases. SoundCloud engineer Peter Bourgon has a good teaser post that in a couple of hours goes from Hello, World! to a concurrent service aggregating data from two separate Weather APIs. For an overview of the Go language, I recommend this free e-book from Karl Seguin, and then there’s the official documentation as well.
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