GAS: Go, Ajax, SVG: Adding Graphics to Go with SVG

November 2009, Google, Inc. announced a new concurrent programming language, Go. Although announced as a lab experimental release, Go’s importance to the community is evidenced by ranking 13th in the March 2010 TIOBE Report. Go presents considerable opportunity for the SVG community, since Go does not have an official graphical user interface library and since concurrency lends itself well to UI development. This paper addresses integrating Go and SVG and is organized along three themes. - Recent prior work for SVG generation from Go. Most work to date is limited to the generation of static SVG from Go, which is can be displayed after the Go program ends. - The proposed technique, GAS. GAS provides an interactive UI architecture using SVG and AJAX as the graphical interface to a concurrently executing Go program. - Possible future trends and directions for Go and SVG including NaCl, browsers extensions, and porting SVG rendering systems natively to Go. Methods of expressing concurrency with Go and SVG are explored and some concrete examples using the GAS API’s and Go are presented.