Go, open-source programming language known for its simplicity and speed. Development of Go began in 2007 with the aim of minimizing programmer effort. It was largely successful in achieving this goal, being ranked in July 2024 as the seventh most popular programming language in the world by the software company TIOBE, which publishes an index that measures programming-language popularity.
“Builds were taking 45 minutes. I considered that painful. When builds take that long, you have a lot of time to think about what you might make better.”
—Rob Pike on C++, GopherCon 2014
A group of Google engineers had the idea to create Go in September 2007. At the time software engineer Rob Pike was working on a Google program that relied on the language C++; however, C++ was slow and unwieldy in the context of Google’s programs.
Pike and fellow engineers Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer aimed to build a new coding language. They borrowed some elements from the coding language C but tailored most aspects of what would become Go to their own preferences. From the start the engineers were focused on creating a language that was capable of writing sizable programs that would be designed and run by large teams. All of Go’s developers had extensive experience with coding languages; e.g., Thompson coinvented UNIX, and he and Pike devised UTF-8, the style of character coding that is almost universally used on the Internet.
The engineers relied heavily on using curly braces, which are used to group together related code statements. Most other languages, including Python, discarded braces in favor of blank spaces, but the Go creators valued the utility of braces in directing programs to process code in large blocks. The engineers also programmed Go to automatically insert semicolons—which signal divisions between sets of code—after code has been written, saving their colleagues a step in the process.
The first public version of Go was released under an open-source license in 2009, and a more stable version was released in 2012. The language was adopted early on by Google programmers working on the company’s popular video-sharing website YouTube, and by 2014 Dropbox had also moved major parts of its infrastructure from Python to Go. An analyst at the firm RedMonk described Go in 2014 as “the emerging language of cloud infrastructure.”
The original URL for Go’s website was golang.org, and the nickname “Golang” quickly caught on across the Internet. The software company JetBrains, after conducting a developer survey in 2020, estimated that 1.1 million professional developers were using Go as their primary language, with another 1.6 million using it for secondary purposes.