Go is 5 years old

In his post on the holiday event, one of the creators of the language, Andrew Gerrand, recalls how these years passed and how everything was five years ago. That's what the official site looked like then; Go’s authors themselves called it a “system language,” each line of code had to end with a semicolon, you had to write makefiles to build your applications - and the future of the language was obscured. Immediately after the release, the “language from Google” attracted wide attention, after which the main wave quickly subsided, not seeing anything new in the language. Those few who saw the future in the language formed the “core” of the team of its developers, and the first version of the language released in 2012 was a major achievement, thanks to which hundreds of programmers have decided to take part in the development of the language and ecosystem around it today.

In addition to the “festive” post, interest is the published transcript of a recent speech by Brad Fitzpatrick about the present and future of Go. Officially, Brad - the creator of memcached, OpenID and LiveJournal - is developing the Camlistore , but in the process he often has to look into the Go sources and add the functionality necessary for Camlistore to the language libraries or fix bugs.

So, regarding the future language. Go 1.4 will include several new features and bug fixes, while laying the foundation for a low-latency garbage collector and the ability to run Go on mobile platforms. Version 1.4 has already been released in the first beta, the release will be released on December 1.

Soon after its release in version 1.5, it is planned to implement a new concurrent garbage collector (concurrent GC), which will reduce the time for this operation and will no longer stop the program execution for several milliseconds every few minutes. The expected release date is 1.5 - June 1, 2015, and the authors of the language are looking forward to the fact that after its release Go will be used to develop those types of applications that were not worth writing on it for certain reasons.

It's still too early to think about Go 2.0 - at least because the developers have not yet decided what can and will need to be “broken", so the second version is not even in the plans. Therefore, what will follow version 1.5, we will find out in the next 5 years - and as a holiday gift on the Gopher Academy blog A series of articles from famous gophers will be published this month.