A brief history of Go language

This is a creation in Article, where the information may have evolved or changed.

When it comes to the origins of the go language, we must look to our respectful eyes at Bell Labs, which continues to deliver astounding results. Bell Labs has come out of a number of Nobel laureates, and some of the research that is crucial to today's technology, such as transistors, communications technology, CCD sensors for digital cameras, and photovoltaic cells, are all from Bell Labs. The laboratory's position in the scientific and technological community can be thought of as an undisputed research mecca.

Here we highlight a section in Bell Labs that is called the Computing Science Center's contribution to operating systems and programming languages. 1969 years back to the first century (most of the readers were not yet born at the time), Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Dennis Ritchie) developed the famous UNIX operating system at Bell Labs ' Computational Science Center, It also derives from the development of UNIX a similarly famous programming language, C language. For a large part of the people, UNIX is the originator of the operating system, C language is also the most widely used programming language in computer courses. UNIX and C have produced countless successful business stories over the past few decades, such as Sun Microsystems, a solar micro-system that was in its heyday in the 90 's, and now the Apple's Mac OS The X OS can actually be considered just a variant of Unix (FreeBSD).

Although such a great achievement has been achieved, Bell Labs these people did not immerse themselves in the aura of the halt. From the 80 's, they started an operating system research project called Plan 9, which was designed to address some of the problems in UNIX and to develop a UNIX follow-up replacement system. In the decades that followed, the project evolved another branch of the project called Inferno, and a programming language called Limbo.

Limbo is a programming language for developing distributed applications that run on small computers. It supports modular programming, compile-time and runtime strong type checking, in-process based on the type of communication channel, atomic garbage collection, and simple abstract data types. It is designed to work safely even on small devices that do not have hardware memory protection.

Limbo language is considered to be the predecessor of the Go language, not only because it is a language designed by the same group of people, but actually the go language inherits many excellent features from the Limbo language.

Bell Labs went through a number of upheavals, including Ken Thompson's Plan 9 project, where the original squad joined Google. At Google, they created the go language. As early as September 2007, the Go language was also the 20% free-time experimental project for Daniel. Fortunately, by the May 2008, Google discovered the great potential of the go language and began to fully support the project so that the people could devote themselves to the design and development of the go language. The first version of the Go language was released formally in November 2009 and rapidly iterated over the following two years. The first official version of the Go language was officially released on March 28, 2012, giving the go language its first compelling milestone.

Based on Google's consistent embrace of open source, the go language naturally chooses to publish in open source and uses the BSD licensing agreement. Anyone can view all the source code of the Go language and dedicate their strength to the go language development.

Google, as the main push of the go language, did not simply push the language to the open source community, not only to create a separate team to develop the go language full-time, but also to gradually increase support for the go language in its own services, such as Google's strategic cloud computing platform Gae (google AppEngine), started supporting the go language very early. According to the current development trend, the go language within Google has gradually replaced the mainstream Java and Python trends. In more products from Google, we will see traces of the go language, such as Google's core search and advertising business.

In the preface of this book, it is clear why Google also designs and launches a new programming language in the age of language flooding. According to the features of the released Go language, we have every reason to believe that Google's launch of the new programming language is more than just a simple rodeo, but a solution to the real problem.

Let's take a look at the main authors of the Go language:

• Ken Thompson (Ken Thompson,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ken_thompson): designed the B and C languages, created the UNIX and Plan 9 operating system, the 1983 Turing Award winner, go co-author.
• Rob Paik (Rob pike,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/rob_pike): A member of the UNIX team, participates in the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and participates in limbo and go language development. One of the authors of the UNIX programming environment.
• Robert Griesemer: Robert Grizemer, who helped make Java's hotspot compiler and Chrome browser's JavaScript engine V8.
• Lasse Cox (Russ cox,http://swtch.com/~rsc/): Involved in the development of the Plan 9 operating system, the Google Code search project leader.
• Ian Thelles (Ian Lance Taylor): An active figure in the GCC community. The main designer of the gold connector and the GCC process optimization LTO, the founder of Zembu company.
• Brad Fitz Patrick (Brad Fitzpatrick,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/brad_fitzpatrick): LiveJournal's founder, author of the famous Open source project memcached.

Although we only have a list here, you can see that the language development team has never been stronger. This allows us to be excited about the excellent features of the go language and is very optimistic about the future of the language.