Overview

Go is an open source, compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent system programming language.

Go aims to provide the efficiency of a statically typed compiled language with the ease of programming of a dynamic language.

Other goals include:

• Safety: Type-safe and memory-safe.
• Intuitive concurrency by providing "goroutines" and channels to communicate between them.
• Efficient garbage collection "with low enough overhead and no significant latency".
• High-speed compilation.

Go's mascot is a gopher.

Installing and using Go

Visit the Go programming download page and choose the option corresponding to your platform or operating system.

History

Go was designed at Google in 2009 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson.