What is Go Lang? History of Go Lang
Go language was created by Google in 2007. And later it was Open-Sourced in 2009 under BSD License.
Since the birth of computers, programming languages have come and gone but only a few of them leave their mark and change how we work. In this article, we will learn one such language, which seems to have the potential for how we will work in the future. Let's see why the developer's community is very optimistic about the Go language also known as GoLang.
History and Need of Go Lang
Go language was created by Google in 2007. And later it was Open-Sourced in 2009 under BSD License. Go language is designed by very famous people in Programming World: Ken Thompson (Creator of Unix OS), Robert Griesemer (One of the main contributors to V8 Engine), and Rob Pike (One of the main contributors to Unix).
But the question arises why Google needs to create GoLang. When the giants like C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python are there then what was the need that gave birth to the Go Language?
The short answer is none of these languages are Modern Languages. They came long back ago. Since then the power and efficiency of computers have improved drastically. And here these old giants create serious issues for developers. As we all know Google has a huge amount of data. And to manage all that Data, Google spends millions of dollars every year on Cloud Infrastructure. But none of the modern languages was able to use the full potential of their Cloud hardware. Below are some of the main issues which make the base for Go Lang.
Lake of Support for Concurrency
Dependency on Virtual Machine
Lack of Efficient Memory Management
A lot of Boilerplate and Complexity in Coding
Slow Build time and Runtime
Lack of Support for Multi-Threading
Features of Go Lang
The above issues make our trio think about a new language. Which inherits Good Features of Old Languages with new additions to tackle modern challenges. Go team wants to create a language that will have:
Static Typing and Run-Time efficiency like C.
Readability Like Python
Go team, also wants to avoid many concepts of other languages like they want to avoid:
Over Complexity of C++.
Dependency of Virtual Machine like Java.
This all things ended up with the creation of a language which is:
Compiled.
Statically Typed.
Runs without Virtual Machine
Built-in support for Concurrency
Powerful Memory Management
Built-in support for Testing
Powerful Standard Libraries
Conclusion
Today Go Lang is one of the Highest Paying programming languages. Go Lang is used by big tech giants including Google, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Paypal, Netflix, American Express, Salesforce, Uber, etc. Big tech giants trust Go Lang for their production projects.
Popular Technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, Fedora CoreOS, and InfluxDB prove the power of Go Lang. After using Go Lang many companies even shrunk their cloud hardware by 50%. To learn more about Go Lang subscribe to my newsletter. We are starting a series on Go Lang...
Jai Hind, Vande Mataram 🇮🇳