My go development box is a virtual machine

I've been playing around with the new go language from Google. It is a very interesting computer language. It is currently only supported on Linux and MacOSX. I've been watching the #go-nuts IRC channel on freenode.net the past few days. A lot of the messages there are pleading for a Windows implementation. I also saw complaints about the mercurial source code version control system used (Oh no, not another version control system...).

Haven't any of these people heard of virtual machines?

I set up a Gentoo Linux image in Qemu and use that for learning Go. It doesn't matter that my laptop is running Windows, the tools I need for Go are right there in the vm. Install mercurial? All I had to do was emerge it. And since I wasn't installing it on my primary machine I didn't think twice.

With all the work I've done on embedded systems and Processing I just don't care so much about what OS or device some software will run on. I have the tools to connect the different platforms. This early release of Go seems especially suited for running network services, and I can whip up a Processing GUI for that, no problem. I do think that a ready-built vm image, either for Qemu or a VMWare appliance, would be a great thing.

Google Go Language