What is Go?
Go is an open source programming language supported by Google.
Go gopher is the mascot of Go language. Here is a article about it's history.
A short history of Go
Forward from this blog
"The story of Go began during second half of 2007 at Google. Three gentlemen from Google - Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson - were trying to tackle some of the engineering challenges they faced. Google, due to it’s scale of operations, faces engineering challenges unlike many other organizations. Selection criteria for the trio to identify which programming language to use centred around three main considerations: efficient compilation, efficient execution and ease of programming.
Though they evaluated many of the existing languages, they couldn’t find any language which offered all three of their primary considerations. That realization led them to think about creating a new programming language. Thus, the seeds to develop Go were planted.
The design began in September 2007 as a 20% project at Google. As things progressed, many others joined as well. In January 2008, work on initial compiler started. The language was open-sourced later in November 2009. It took a few more years to release first stable version Go, in March 2012. Thus, the story of Go started and continues ever since."
Why it named Go?
Rob Pike, one of the creators of Go, has a blog post for Go’s 10th anniversary where he discusses some of its history. Go: Ten years and climbing i had a couple of thoughts on the drive home.
name
'go'. you can invent reasons for this name but it has nice properties. it's short, easy to type. tools: goc, gol, goa. if there's an interactive debugger/interpreter it could just be called 'go'. the suffix is .go
What is Go used for?
Go was originally built for programs related to networking and infrastructure. It was intended to replace popular high-performance server-side languages like Java and C++. Today, Go is used for a variety of applications like cloud and server side applications, DevOps, command line tools and much more.
Features
• Open-Source. • Static Typing. • Concurrency Support. • Powerful Standard Library and Tool Set. • Testing Capabilities. • Garbage Collection. • Ease of Use. Cross-Platform Development Opportunities.