1. 1

2. Mike Gehard
Software Engineer, Pivotal Labs
Go Within Cloud Foundry
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3. ME
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4. 4
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5. 5
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6. History of Go
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6

7. History of Go
6
September 21, 2007
Work begins on Go within Google
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson
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8. History of Go
6
September 21, 2007
Work begins on Go within Google
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson
Late 2008
Russ Cox joins team
6

9. History of Go
6
September 21, 2007
Work begins on Go within Google
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson
Late 2008
Russ Cox joins team
November 10, 2009
Public, open source project
6

10. History of Go
6
September 21, 2007
Work begins on Go within Google
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson
Late 2008
Russ Cox joins team
November 10, 2009
Public, open source project
March 28, 2012
Go 1.0 released
6

11. History of Go
6
September 21, 2007
Work begins on Go within Google
Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson
Late 2008
Russ Cox joins team
November 10, 2009
Public, open source project
March 28, 2012
Go 1.0 released
Early 2013
GoRouter put into production
6

12. Why Go?
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for
systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice
of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient
compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not
available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were
choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed
languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser
extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted,
dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed,
compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and
multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a
few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these
goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but
lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid
dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
- Go FAQ (http://golang.org/doc/faq#creating_a_new_language)
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13. 8
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14. 8
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
8

15. 8
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
8

16. 9
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted,
dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically
typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for
networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it
should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a
single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of
linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency
and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These
cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was
called for.
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
9

17. 10
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
10

18. 11
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19. 12
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20. 13
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
13

21. 14
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
14

22. 15
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
15

23. 16
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24. 17
Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and
environments for systems programming. Programming had
become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to
blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation,
efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were
not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers
who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by
moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and
JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.
Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an
interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and
safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to
be modern, with support for networked and multicore
computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at
most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single
computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number
of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system;
concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency
specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by
libraries or tools; a new language was called for.
17

25. 18
cannot be addressed well by libraries
or tools; a new language was called
for.
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42. Credits
• http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sebilden/6898920548
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/samjuk/1215416320
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/40320455@N03/4289782818
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/55723329@N00/6657150957
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43. Questions?
@mikegehard
@pivotallabs
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