Go (programming language)

Go (often referred to as Golang) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that is statically typed and compiled. Originally designed in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, Go was publicly announced in November 2009, and is developed by Google and community contributors. Go has a simple syntax similar to C++, as well as garbage collection, structural typing, CSP-style concurrency, and a broad standard library.

There are two major implementations:

The original, self-hosting compiler toolchain, initially developed inside Google;

A frontend written in C++, called gofrontend, originally a GCC frontend, providing gccgo, a GCC-based Go compiler; later extended to also support LLVM, providing an LLVM-based Go compiler called gollvm.

History

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 criticisms 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)

High-performance networking and multiprocessing

Its 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.

Go developers implemented runtime support for concurrency in response to the availability of multicore systems:

Although the design of most languages concentrates on innovations in syntax, semantics, or typing, Go is focused on the software development process itself. ...