Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, there has been a slow flood of powerful new languages and paradigms—Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript—have taken an expanding user base by storm and has become one of the most popular languages (up there with stalwarts such as C, C++, and Java). Multithreading, memory caching, and APIs have allowed multiple processes, dissonant languages, applications, and even separate operating systems to work in congress.
And while this is great, there's a niche that until very recently was largely unserved: powerful, compiled, cross-platform languages with concurrency support that are geared towards systems programmers.
So when Google announced Go in 2009, which included some of the best minds in language design (and programming in general)—Rob Pike and Ken Thompson of Bell Labs fame and Robert Griesemer, who worked on Google's JavaScript implementation V8—to design a modern, concurrent language with development ease at the forefront.
For Go programming bright future, the team focused on some sore spots in the alternatives, which are as follows:
- Dynamically typed languages have—in recent years—become incredibly popular. Go eschews the explicit, "cumbersome" type systems of Java or C++. Go uses type inference, which saves development time, but is still also strongly typed.
- Concurrency, parallelism, pointers/memory access, and garbage collection are unwieldy in the aforementioned languages. Go lets these concepts be as easy or as complicated as you want or need them to be.
- As a newer language, Go has a focus on multicore design that was a necessary afterthought in languages such as C++.
- Go's compiler is super-fast; it's so fast that there are implementations of it that treat Go code as interpreted.
- Although Google designed Go to be a systems language, it's versatile enough to be used in a myriad of ways. Certainly, the focus on advanced, cheap concurrency makes it ideal for network and systems programming.
- Go is loose with syntax, but strict with usage. By this we mean that Go will let you get a little lazy with some lexer tokens, but you still have to produce fundamentally tight code. As Go provides a formatting tool that attempts to clarify your code, you can also spend less time on readability concerns as you're coding