Introduction

A brief history of Go

• Began life at Google and is widely used there.
• Conceived in 2007, publicly announced 2009, and v1 was released in 2012
• Designers cited their dislike of C++ as a primary motivation for designing Go

Core tenets

Compiled - Go compiles to a binary that can run on all common operating systems.

Concurrency-forward - Go handles the heavy lifting for matching routines to threads. You get to focus on the logic.

Object-oriented/imperative - While you can apply many functional concepts here, Go is unabashedly object-oriented.

Statically-typed - Everything has a type!

I C what you did there

Go takes its cues from C, Python, and Java; but adopted patterns from dynamically typed languages:

• type inference
• semicolons are inferred
• fast compilation
• remote package management and online documentation

Already ready already

• Robust native tooling
• Built-in concurrency primitives
• Language provides tools for building, formatting, running, documenting, etc
• Native unit testing library (though supplementing it is recommended)
• Built-in dependency management

Upsides

• Easy to learn
• Large, excited community
• Simple concurrency
• Robust plug-ins for most popular IDEs
• FUN

Downsides

• Unit testing with mocks has a learning curve
• Error handling may be bulky for some
• Concurrency is easy to learn, difficult to master