WHY? base64, sha1, uuid (all required for websockets), clean threading and event system and finally a nice file monitoring abstraction. Yes most of these are available in c/c++ libraries via openssl, glib and libuv. But these are hindered by either licensing issues (I want this to be a simple 'tight static binary' aka, a stripped single file). Go ticks all boxes and has these features out of the box. (luajit/libuv aka luvit a close second) It's only when you look at what is out there that you realized how good what you've got is. So to the Java developers and the amazing work everyone in that community has done over the last 10 odd years THANK YOU. To all the opensource project contributors THANK YOU! (not to mention the go(ogle) team, Trolltech/Nokia (please make qt.core bsd/apache licensed one of these days) and of course the glib/Gnome guys, oh and also Apple CF(lite) is something that should get more attention outside of osx development) Oh and to compile this you will probably have to install go (and have it's toolchain available in your path. on osx `brew install go` does a good job of this. NOTE to build you will need to build agains the go tip (thanks to lack of hybi websocket support in the current release tag - as of 1/1/2012) and apply the patch located at: http://codereview.appspot.com/5304046/. NOTE you will have to massage the makefile by hand to have it patch correctly.