What Is Go?

Go (often called "Golang" because of its old website, golang.org) is a statically-typed, compiled, open-source language created at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It was announced in 2009 and reached version 1.0 in 2012.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, world!")
}

Go was designed to keep large codebases easy to read and fast to build. Its defining traits:

• Small, simple language — only 25 keywords, one loop keyword (for), and no classes or inheritance.
• Compiled to native code — a Go program builds into a single executable file that runs without installing a runtime or VM.
• Garbage collected — memory is freed automatically, so there is no manual free/delete as in C or C++.
• Concurrency built in — lightweight goroutines and channels are part of the language itself (covered in a later level).
• Opinionated tooling — formatting (gofmt), testing (go test), and dependency management (go mod) all ship with the standard go command.