Version
To check which version of Go lang you are using, run the following command in your terminal:
go version
About GO
Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google.
It runs on most operative systems, including the obvious major ones such as Windows and OSX, Unix, and Linux.
GO utilizes a very similar syntax to C, and it aims to be as efficient as these languages while offering the
friendliness
and functionality that a language like Python has. Nevertheless, GO is very different from C, featuring backward
declarations
(from the perspective of Java or C), along with many other features that are interesting to look at.
GO was developed at Google in the 2000s, as one might expect, the utility of the language resides mostly in
software engineering.
The stories tell that GO was developed while waiting for code in other languages to compile.
GO as a solution to long waiting times is extremely efficient, especially when running on increasingly modern
hardware.
This is because GO is designed to run on multiple cores, which practically all modern computers have nowadays.
GO is extremely efficient because of one of its very notable particularities/functionalities, the “goroutines”.
Understanding these fully without being a seasoned programmer is very difficult,
especially for a short article like this, but essentially what goroutines do is that they allow programmers
to run different functions concurrently, essentially at the same time.
They are way cheaper than the traditional way of doing this kind of task (threads), and best of all,
the resource-saving and resource-administrating procedures are all hidden for the programmer,
one must simply call the goroutine and it will naturally be extremely efficient with increasingly complex tasks.
People use GO for a huge array of tasks, some people consider it as an alternative for Python
(great for website interactions or even some data analysis), others consider it better than C++ for game
programming,
software development, and general task engineering. While GO is not as mainstream yet, it sure has applicability
across different fields,
especially when efficiency is a priority, without sacrificing the high-level functionality that Python
has.
Releases
The most recent version of this language, GO version 1.13 was released in September of 2019.
Only a few months after version 1.12. This shows that the language is constantly maintained and updated,
which makes it an excellent candidate for your new, or even first language.