Overview of Go Language
Go language was developed in the year 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google and publicly announced in 2009. It was officially released in 2012 as an open-source programming language.
Go language also called Golang, is a procedural language. Programs in Go are assembled by using packages for efficient management of dependencies.
Advantages of using Go are listed below:
- Go Language is safe as it is strongly and statically typed and supports garbage collection.
- It supports concurrent programming, functional programming, and interfaces.
- Compiles fast like an interpreted language.
- Concise, explicit, and easy to read.
- In-built support for distributed applications.
- Go provides unit testing features in itself.
- Platform independent.
Official website https://go.dev
Go Documentation: https://go.dev/doc
Go playground: https://go.dev/play
Golang release history
| Major Release | Release Date |
|---|---|
| Go 1.18 | 2022-03-15 |
| Go 1.17 | 2021-08-16 |
| Go 1.16 | 2021-02-16 |
| Go 1.15 | 2020-08-11 |
| Go 1.14 | 2020-02-25 |
| Go 1.13 | 2019-09-03 |
| Go 1.12 | 2019-02-25 |
| Go 1.1 | 2013-05-13 |
| Go 1 | 2012-03-28 |
Visit Go release history for more information.
Golang is commonly used for the following applications:
- Distributed Network Services
- DevOps and Site Reliability
- Web development
- Command-line interfaces
- Cloud-based programming
Some Integrated development environments (IDEs) that support Go are:
- VSCode
- Epsilon
- Sublime
- IntelliJ
- Emacs
Learn to install Go in the next chapter.