In the first chapter of the book, you will be introduced to Go and take a tour of the features that have made the language a favorite among its adopters. The start of the chapter provides the motivation behind the Go programming language. If you are impatient, however, you are welcome to skip to any of the other topics and learn how to write your first Go program. Finally, the Go in a nutshell section provides a high-level summary of the characteristics of the language.
The following topics are covered in this chapter:
Since the invention of the C language in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs, the computing industry has produced many popular languages that are based directly on (or have borrowed ideas from) its syntax. Commonly known as the C-family of languages, they can be split into two broad evolutionary branches. In one branch, derivatives such as C++, C#, and Java have evolved to adopt a strong type system, object orientation, and the use of compiled binaries. These languages, however, tend to have a slow build-deploy cycle and programmers are forced to adopt a complex object-oriented type system to attain runtime safety and speed of execution:
In the other evolutionary linguistic branch are languages such as Perl, Python, and JavaScript that are described as dynamic languages for their lack of type safety formalities, use of lightweight scripting syntax, and code interpretation instead of compilation. Dynamic languages have become the preferred tool for web and cloud scale development where speed and ease of deployment are valued over runtime safety. The interpreted nature of dynamic languages means, however, they generally run slower than their compiled counterparts. In addition, the lack of type safety at runtime means the correctness of the system scales poorly as the application grows.
Go was created as a system language at Google in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thomson to handle the needs of application development. The designers of Go wanted to mitigate the issues with the aforementioned languages while creating a new language that is simple, safe, consistent, and predictable. As Rob Pike puts it:
"Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of a statically-typed language with the expressiveness and convenience of a dynamically-typed interpreted language."
Go borrows ideas from different languages that came before it, including:
The remainder of this chapter will walk you through an introductory set of steps that will give you a preview of the language and get you started with building and running your first Go program. It is a precursor to the topics that are covered in detail in the remaining chapters of the book. You are welcome to skip to other chapters if you already have a basic understanding of Go.
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