A simple game of life written in Go.

Because I wanted to. Or better yet, because I can :). In all seriousness though, I just wanted to learn Go and I have always wanted to implement my own Conway's Game of Life. I learned a lot about Go, HTTP, and concurrency in this project. I also learned how fun Go is to program.

I intentionally tried not to look at other implementations of Conway's Game of Life. The implementation I wrote tracks the system state using a slice of alive cells. At each iteration, only the neighborhoods of the currently alive cells are checked and updated. Checks are done concurrently. I have implemented wrapping at the system edges; the left wraps to the right and the top wraps to the bottom. Wrapping was implemented as the better alternative to hard borders. A true Conway's Game of Life would track an infinite plane. This can easily be added to the current implementation, although it is very slow and typically blows up in population. Hence, I opted for wrapping at the edges. Perhaps if I feel like it, I will make a branch with an infinite plane.

The following technologies were utilized in this project:

• HTMX. For handling HTTP requests on the frontend and for establishing a SSE connection.
• Templ. For templating HTML components in Go.
• Go. The language of choice. This project was an excuse to learn Go in the first place.

Simply clone this repository to install. Also make sure Templ is installed:

$ go install github.com/a-h/templ/cmd/templ@latest

To build and run, execute the following

$ templ generate # Only run if any .templ files were changed. 
$ go run . # Run with --help for usage.