Five Years of the Go Programming Language

omar.sahal writes Go celebrates five years of its existence with this blog post recapping a little history, future and some philosophy. "Five years ago we launched the Go project. It seems like only yesterday that we were preparing the initial public release: our website was a lovely shade of yellow, we were calling Go a 'systems language,' and you had to terminate statements with a semicolon and write Makefiles to build your code. We had no idea how Go would be received. Would people share our vision and goals? Would people find Go useful?" The Go programming language has grown to find its own niche in the cloud computing word, having been used to code Docker and the Kubernetes projects. The developers also announced details of further projects to be released, such as a new low-latency garbage collector and support for running Go on mobile devices.

Comments

For those interested...

[Dimwit]

Go was developed in large part by Rob Pike who has a long history of concucrrency programming going back to Plan 9 from Bell Labs and earlier.

Some of his more interesting papers about concurrency are:

http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/n... (The Newsqueak Programming Language)
http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/n... (Newsqueak Implementation)
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/... (A Concurrent Window System)

You can even see some hints of what was to come in his paper outlining the design of the Blit terminal for Unix:
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs...

Re:For those interested...

[TheCarp]

Interesting. I have been kicking around go on one of my side projects for a while now and I have come to REALLY LIKE the language. I never thought I would be happy to see typed variables again, but now, I like it so much, I get a bit annoyed at languages that don't have typed variables.

It doesn't surprise me that the lead developer has so much history, because the language feels like someone said "Ok what have we learned since C came out" and then reverted all the way back to there and built something new and clean from the lessons learned.

It reminds me a lot of the perl philosophy of "make it easy to do common things", no more fumbling around with memory allocation, it doesn't entirely do it for you, but it provides a very clean interface that makes sense for allocating what you need when you need it.

Re:So no one has used it yet?

[chuckymonkey]

It says right in the summary. Docker is one of them. Here's a few others: Doozer(Heroku) DropBox backend services CloudFlare SoundCloud BBC uses it pretty extensively etc....etc