The History of Go

Go's story begins in 2007 at Google, where three veteran engineers — Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson — started sketching out a new language during the long waits for one of Google's massive C++ codebases to finish compiling. Rob Pike and Ken Thompson were already legends in computing, having helped build Unix and the UTF-8 encoding decades earlier.

Which company designed and originally developed Go?

The trio wanted a language that fixed two frustrations at once: agonizingly slow compile times on huge codebases, and how genuinely hard it was to write simple, reliable concurrent programs in the languages Google already used. Go was designed from day one to compile fast and to make concurrency a first-class, built-in feature instead of an afterthought.

Go was announced publicly and open-sourced in November 2009, but it wasn't considered stable enough for serious production use until Go 1.0 shipped in March 2012 — the release that locked in Go's long-term promise of backward compatibility for existing programs.

Go reached its stable, backward-compatible 1.0 release in ____.

Although the language is simply called Go, its official website is golang.org rather than go.org — the shorter domain was already owned by someone else — which is exactly why so many developers casually call it "Golang." Its mascot, a friendly blue gopher designed by illustrator Renée French, has become almost as recognizable as the language's name itself.

"Golang" is Go's official name, while "Go" is just a shortened nickname developers use.