Golang

Golang, officially called Go, is an open-source programming language developed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It was announced in 2009 to address concerns about scale, readability, and dependency management in large software projects, and the first stable version, Go 1.0, was released in 2012. The name Golang is a popular informal referent derived from the domain golang.org, but the language itself is referred to as Go.

Go is a statically typed, compiled language designed for simplicity and reliability. It produces native machine code and includes a garbage collector, a lightweight type system, and a small standard library. A core feature is concurrency support through goroutines, lightweight threads managed by the Go runtime, and channels for safe communication between them. The language emphasizes fast compilation and a uniform toolchain, including formatting (gofmt), building, testing, and dependency management via modules.

Go is widely used for cloud-native and server-side software, including web services, distributed systems, and command-line tools. Its strong standard library and ecosystem have made it popular for microservices, networking tools, and DevOps projects. Notable projects implemented in Go include Docker and Kubernetes, among others, which demonstrate its suitability for scalable, maintainable software across multiple platforms.

Open source and governed by the Go project, Go is maintained by a community of contributors along with Google. It supports major platforms and architectures and continues to evolve through regular releases that introduce language improvements and tooling enhancements.