Disclaimer: This lesson was specifically prepared for Stellenbosch Computer Club.
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming.
Rob Pike jokes that the idea for Go arose while waiting for a large Google server to compile.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language.
Features include:
- Native code generation (compiled and compiled very quickly)
- Statically typed
- Composition via interfaces
- Memory safe
- Garbage collected
- Native concurrency support
- Excellent standard library
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson started sketching the goals for a new language on the white board on September 21, 2007.
Ken Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system with Dennis Ritchie for which they received a Turing award.
Ken Thompson and Rob "Commander" Pike are best known for their work at Bell Labs. Both have created some of their own languages including B, Limbo and Sawzall. They have co-created UTF8, work together on the creation of Plan 9 and now they work on Golang at Google.
Go became a public open source project on November 10, 2009.
Go version 1 has been released March 2012.
Go works on Linux, Mac OSX, FreeBSD and Windows.
Companies that have started using Go include:
- BBC Worldwide
- Canonical
- Soundcloud
- Others -> https://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/GoUsers
Go To Source Step1.go, etc.