OSICT

Google has launched a new systems programming language called Go as open source software. It is an experimental language, and Google is looking to the open source community for help in developing the software.

Work on the design of the Go language began on September 21, 2007 when Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson sketched the basic design goals on a whiteboard at Google. Staff at Google had become frustrated by the systems programming languages then available. They felt that there was a choice between speed of programming, compiling or ease of programming.

In January 2008 work began on a compiler which produced C code. By the end of 2008 the GCC compiler was reaching completion.

The main goal of Go is to combine the speed and ease of programming of an interpreted language with the "efficiency and safety" of a compiled language. Go draws many concepts from languages such as C and Pascal, yet it is a brand new language. Another goal of Go is to run efficiently (i.e. in parallel) on multi-core machines. As such it draws some ideas from the Newsqueak and Limbo languages.

At the time of writing Google is not using Go in its production environment. The exception to this is the website golang.org which is served by Go.

For more details, to download or to be involved with the project, go to the website golang.org