What Is Go?

During the second half of 2007, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson started discussing the design of a new programming language that would solve some problems they were experiencing when writing software at Google, such as the increased complexity to use some languages, long code compilation times, and not being able to program efficiently on multiprocessor computers.

Rob Pike was trying to take some concurrency and communicating channels ideas into C++, based on his earlier work on the Newsqueak language in 1988, as he describes in Go: Ten years and climbing (Further reading) and Less is exponentially more (Further reading). This turned out to be too hard to implement. He would work out of the same office with Robert Griesemer and Ken Thompson. Ken had worked together with Rob Pike in the past to create the character-encoding UTF-8, while Ken Thompson had designed and implemented the Unix operating system and invented the B programming language (the predecessor to...