Origin and Evolution of Go
This lesson provides a brief introduction to the Go programming language by discussing its history and how it outshines other languages.
We'll cover the following
Introduction #
Also known as Golang, Go is a programming language designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software solutions. Go is a statically typed and compiled programming language. Statically typed means that variable types are explicitly declared and thus are determined at compile time. Whereas, by compiled language we mean a language that translates source code to machine code before execution.
Note: Throughout this course, we will use the word Go and Golang interchangeably.
History #
Go’s year of genesis was 2007 at Google, and it was publicly launched in 2009 with a fully open-source BSD-style license released for the Linux and Mac OS platforms. The first Windows-port was announced on November 22 of the same year. Go 1.0 (the first production-ready version) was released in March 2012. Since 2012, Go has grown from version 1.1 to 1.12 (March 2019), and work for Go 2.0 is underway!
The below figure shows the Go development timeline starting from its genesis to the year 2019.
Programming language hall of fame
Go initiated a lot of stir after its public release in January 2010. In 2009 and again in 2016, Go was pronounced language of the year by Tiobe, which is well-known for its popularity ranking of programming languages. In this ranking, it secured the 10th place in November 2018, with a popularity of nearly 2.5 %. The Programming Language of the Year award is given to the programming language rated the highest in that year. Hall of fame is given below:
That’s all for the introduction. Now let’s see why Go was developed.