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

Re:For those interested...

[Dutch Gun]

From someone who knows little about the Go language (I just read up on Wikipedia a bit just now), could someone fill me in on what particular niche Go fills? Is it essentially a haven for people who dislike C++ (apparently the view of the language authors) but think C is too dangerous / archaic? What does it do that D doesn't, for example. Or maybe it's better to ask what it does better than D?

Also, now that C++ is moving forward much faster with language evolution (C++11/14 have modernized the language significantly with many advanced features), is Go still as relevant as it was five years ago? For instance, you say "no more fumbling around with memory allocation", but that describes my experience with C++ for years now, since smart pointers have been standardized. Then again, in C++, you need to discipline yourself to use the language appropriately, because you can do many awful things that are perfectly legal, language-wise.

Programmers love inventing languages (it's like a rite of passage, I think), but achieving significant and sustained adoption of your new language is always the tricky part. It's not just good enough to be better than language x. You have to provide so much more value that it overcomes existing inertia, which is pretty substantial in the world of C and C++.