Go (programming language)

Go
Go
Paradigm	Multi-paradigm: concurrent, imperative, functional, object-oriented
Designed by	Robert Griesemer; Rob Pike; Ken Thompson
Developer	Google and contributors
First appeared	November 10, 2009
Stable release	1.27.1 / 1 September 2026
Typing discipline	Inferred, static, strong, structural, nominal
Memory management	Garbage collection
Implementation language	Go, Assembly language (gc); C++ (gofrontend)
OS	DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Plan 9, Solaris, Windows
License	3-clause BSD + patent grant
Filename extensions	.go
Website	go.dev
Major implementations
	gc, gofrontend, gold
Influenced by
	C, Oberon-2, Limbo, Active Oberon, communicating sequential processes, Pascal, Oberon, Smalltalk, Newsqueak, Modula-2, Alef, APL, BCPL, Modula, occam
Influenced
	Crystal, V

Go (often referred to as Golang) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language that is statically typed and compiled. Originally designed in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson, Go was publicly announced in November 2009, and is developed by Google and community contributors. Go has a simple syntax similar to C++, as well as garbage collection, structural typing, CSP-style concurrency, and a broad standard library.

There are two major implementations:

The original, self-hosting compiler toolchain, initially developed inside Google;
A frontend written in C++, called gofrontend, originally a GCC frontend, providing gccgo, a GCC-based Go compiler; later extended to also support LLVM, providing an LLVM-based Go compiler called gollvm.