About Go

First appeared in 2007, 13 years ago

Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go is syntactically similar to C, but with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. The language is often referred to as Golang because of its domain name, golang.org, but the proper name is Go. There are two major implementations: Google's self-hosting compiler toolchain targeting multiple operating systems, and WebAssembly. gccgo, a GCC frontend.

Go was designed at Google in 2007 to improve programming productivity in an era of multicore, networked machines and large codebases. The designers wanted to address criticism of other languages in use at Google, but keep their useful characteristics: static typing and run-time efficiency (like C), readability and usability (like Python or JavaScript),high-performance networking and multiprocessing. The designers were primarily motivated by their shared dislike of C++ Go was publicly announced in November 2009, and version 1.0 was released in March 2012. Go is widely used in production at Google and in many other organizations and open-source projects.