Go
![Golang logo](/jargon/g/golang.png)
Go, also known as golang, is a computer programming language whose development began in 2007 at Google, and it was introduced to the public in 2009.
Go's three lead developers at Google were Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Their goal was to create a language, loosely based on the syntax of C, which would eliminate the "extraneous garbage" of languages such as C++. As a result, Go does not include some "extraneous" features of other modern languages, such as method and operator overloading, pointer arithmetic, and type inheritance.
Go has some specific formatting requirements, including how indentation and spaces are used. It also requires that none of the declared variables or imported libraries are unused. All functions in Go require a return statement.
Go uses "type inference" in variable declarations: the variable type is inferred by the value type itself, rather than being an explicit part of the declaration statement. For example, where in C an integer variable x could be set to the value 0 with the statement:
int x = 0;
In Go, the equivalent statement would be:
x := 0
The variable would be typed as an integer based on the value itself.
Here is the classic "Hello, World!" program, as written in Go:
package main import "fmt" func main() { fmt.Println("Hello, World") }