The Go programming language, sometimes referred to as Google's golang, is making strong gains in popularity

Go is a programming language created at Google in late 2007 and released as open-source in November 2009. Since then, it has operated as a public project, with contributions from thousands of individuals and dozens of companies. Go has become a popular language for building cloud infrastructure: Docker, a Linux container manager, and Kubernetes, a container deployment system, are core cloud technologies written in Go. Today, Go is the foundation for critical infrastructure at every major cloud provider and is the implementation language for most projects hosted at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Early users were attracted to Go for a variety of reasons. A garbage-collected, statically compiled language for building systems was unusual. Go's native support for concurrency and parallelism helped take advantage of the multicore machines that were becoming mainstream at the time. Self-contained binaries and easy cross-compilation simplified deployment. And Google's name was undoubtedly a draw.

Go has become popular when so many other language projects have not.

Go is built for software engineering today. Not everything new is great, but when a programming language is designed for exactly the environment most of us use right now—scalable, cloud-based servers optimized for performance—a lot can go right. Go is compilable on nearly any machine, so you can use it to create a full web app or a tool to clean up incoming data for processing. Like Perl before it, Go is a Swiss Army knife, but one that has stripped off all of the overhead and extra junk accreted onto programming platforms over the past few decades.

The Go programming language, sometimes referred to as Google's golang is making strong gains in popularity. While languages such as Java and C continue to dominate programming, new models have emerged that are better suited to modern computing, particularly in the cloud. Go's increasing use is due, in part, to the fact that it is a lightweight, open-source language suited for today's microservices architectures. Container darling Docker and Google's container orchestration product Kubernetes are built using Go. Go is also gaining ground in data science, with strengths that data scientists are looking for in overall performance and the ability to go from "the analyst's laptop to full production."

What makes Go so popular?

Some programming languages were hacked together over time, whereas others were created academically. Still, others were designed in a different age of computing with different problems, hardware, and needs. Go is an explicitly engineered language intended to solve problems with existing languages and tools while natively taking advantage of modern hardware architectures. It has been designed not only with teams of developers in mind but also for long-term maintainability. At its core, Go is pragmatic. In the real world of IT, complex, large-scale software is written by large teams of developers. These developers typically have varying skill levels, from juniors up to seniors. Go is easy to become functional with and appropriate for junior developers to work on. Also, having a language that encourages readability and comprehension is extremely useful. The mixture of duck typing (via interfaces) and convenience features such as ":=" for short variable declarations give Go the feel of a dynamically typed language while retaining the positives of a strongly typed one.

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