What is GO programming language?
GO (Golang) is a compiled statically typed programming language from Google. The GO language – intended for creating various kinds of applications. But first of all – web services and client-server applications. Although the language also capabilities for working with graphics, low-level capabilities, etc.
Work on the GO began in 2007 in the bowels of Google. One of the authors is Ken Thompson, who, by the way, is also one of the authors of the C language (along with Denis Ritchie). The language was announced on November 10, 2009, and version 1.0 was released in March 2012. At the same time, the language continues to develop. The current version at the time of this writing is version 1.17, which was released in August 2021 (for which subversions are constantly being released).
The GO language is developing as open source, that is, it is an open source project, and all its codes and compiler can be found and used for free. The official website of the project is https://golang.org, where you can find a lot of useful information about the language.
Where is GO language used?
GO is cross-platform, it allows you to create programs for various operating systems – Windows, Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD. The code – portable: programs written for one of these operating systems can easily ported to another operating system with recompilation.
The main features of the GO:
- compiled – the compiler translates the GO program into machine code that is understandable for a particular platform
- statically typed
- there is a garbage collector that automatically cleans up memory
- support for working with network protocols
- support for multithreading and parallel programming
GO – currently widely used in various fields. In particular, among the well-known projects that use GO. You can find the following: Google, Dropbox, Netflix, Kubernetes, Docker, Twitch, Uber, CloudFlare and a number of others.
What do you need to work with GO? First of all, you need a text editor to type the code and a compiler to convert the code into an executable file. You can also use custom integrated development environments (IDEs) that support Go, such as GoLand from JetBrains. There are Go plugins for other IDEs, notably IntelliJ IDEA and Netbeans.
