Amazon last week announced its first developer preview release of an Amazon Web Services SDK for the Go programming language.

The release, which is available on GitHub, incorporates a number of additions since Amazon first announced that it was developing an SDK for Go. These include response pagination and a concurrent streaming upload and download manager for Amazon S3, as well as a new guide designed to help developers get started with the SDK.

Now that the AWS SDK for Go is out of its experimental phase, Amazon is asking for the help of the developer community as it looks to make improvements that it can incorporate into a stable 1.0 version of the SDK. "Don’t be shy about letting us know what you do and don’t like on our GitHub Issues page!" Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, implored developers on the AWS blog.

Still Go-ing Places

The Go programming language, which Google developed in 2007, continues to grow in popularity due in large part to its built-in support for concurrency. As of January, RedMonk found that Go was the 17th most popular programming language in the world. Particularly given its popularity among startups, it's no surprise that AWS, which is the most popular and successful cloud hosting platform in the world, would seek to provide a Go SDK.

But even companies that don't serve as many customers as AWS need to take note of languages like Go, Scala, Clojure and Swift. Although not all of these are brand spanking new, the dynamic nature of software development and the rise of the Web has created a market in which a number of niche programming languages are being adopted widely enough to make them of interest and potential importance to API providers. While many companies will not be able to offer 10 SDKs for various programming languages and platforms like AWS, to drive and maximize developer adoption, many will realistically need to look at supporting languages like Go.