“Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.”
Go was announced back in 2009 and had its 1.0 release in 2012. It started with a promise of being able to code systems-level high-performance networking and multiprocessing applications with ease and high-readability. It’s aim is to perform at the level of compiled languages like C/C++ while offering a development experience like Python or Javascript. It has built-in concurrency primitives, remote package management and a toolchain to generate static linked binaries, which plays very well with container based environments.
As always, early versions were missing a lot of the promises it had initially, mainly being the compiler and general runtime performance. But it’s been a few years now and these problems are actually a thing in the past. We started using Go in small command-line tools first, in its somewhat earlier days. After it gained stability we went all-in for our geo-distributed video streaming product for the application responsible for route-finding and interfacing with all other components. It still has some quirks but overall we have great fun using it everyday.
Also, we’re highly involved in other technologies like kubernetes, grafana and prometheus which are all written in go so it really helps working on them or even reading the source code when needed.
