At a hackathon about 6 months ago I decided to write a seam carver [0] in Go. I had no previous Go experience (not even "hello world"), so it was entirely new to me. Not only did I find the language a pleasure to use, but I was supremely impressed by the standard library and its heavy support for image manipulation.
I wouldn't say it's that much better than alternatives. I find it quite a bit better designed than C++ or the like, but if you're very comfortable with C++ or something, I think it'd probably be equally easy to code things like graphical plugins in either language.
No, and I'm currently travelling and it's on another machine than the one I have with me. That being said, I may take some time on one of my following flights to rewrite it. I wasn't too proud of the first iteration, anyway (being my first foray into Go).
The HN effect isn't that big. Quadruply so in this case as it's making the front page during the dead hours of HN, with but 18 upvotes and a couple of comments.
This site fell over with minimal attention.
I'm a broken record on this, but people should not blame Wordpress for the continual pattern of poorly configured Wordpress instances, as the platform is built to have a caching plugin of one sort of another: I have Wordpress instances that serve enormous loads without breaking a sweat (even on AWS micro instances), all courtesy of absolutely rudimentary functionality of W3TC.
Seriously, when you submit your own stuff there should be a checkbox acknowledging that you have basic caching in place.
If it's avoidable (and on very static type pages like this, it should be) then yah. Keep in mind that what seems easy to you may be wildly new territory for others. Just because you're technical doesn't mean you know the ins and outs of running a server.
My first impression is that nd-array/matrix manipulation sucks big time in golang, compared to matlab or python/numpy. I'll go further and say it sucks even compared to C++ and vanilla C.
I've been thinking about playing around with Go as a platform for writing some simple video games. I saw the Go-SDL bindings on github, but I have no idea if they're any good. It looks like no one has worked on them for a couple of years.
Is anyone using them, or other similar sprite libraries with Go?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seam_carving