This book is written with intermediate to advanced Go developers in mind. These developers will be looking to squeeze more performance out of their Go application. To do this, this book will help to drive the four golden signals as defined in the Site Reliability Engineering Workbook (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/). If we can reduce latency and errors, as well as increase traffic whilst reducing saturation, our programs will continue to be more performant. Following the ideology of the four golden signals is beneficial for anyone developing a Go application with performance in mind.

In this chapter, you'll be introduced to some of the core concepts of performance in computer science. You'll learn some of the history of the Go computer programming language, how its creators decided that it was important to put performance at the forefront of the language, and why writing performant Go is important. Go is a programming language designed with performance in mind, and this book will take you through some of the highlights on how to use some of Go's design and tooling to your advantage. This will help you to write more efficient code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding performance in computer science
• A brief history of Go
• The ideology behind Go performance

These topics are provided to guide you in beginning to understand the direction you need to take to write highly performant code in the Go language.