Go language design
The original goal of Go was to create a new language that is simple, reliable, and efficient. As mentioned, Go is heavily influenced by C programming language. The language itself is very simple, with only 25 keywords. It was built to integrate well with IDEs, but not to be dependent on them. In my experience, anyone who has tried Go has found it very user-friendly with a short learning curve.
One of the main goals of Go was to deal with some of the negative aspects of C++ and Java code, while retaining the performance. The language needed to be simple and consistent to manage very large development teams.
Variables are statically typed, and applications are compiled quickly to statically linked binaries. Having a single statically linked binary makes it very easy to create lightweight containers. The final applications run fast as well, running close to C++ and Java performance and much faster than interpreted languages such as Python. There are pointers, but there is no pointer arithmetic allowed. Go does not tout itself as an object-oriented programming language, and it does not formally have classes in the traditional sense; however, it does contain a number of mechanisms that closely resemble an object-oriented programming language. This is discussed in more depth in the following chapter. Interfaces are used heavily, and composition is the equivalent of inheritance.
Go has many interesting features. One feature that stands out is the built-in concurrency. Just put the word "go" before any function call, and it will spawn a lightweight thread to execute the function. Another feature that is quite important is the dependency management, which is very efficient. The dependency management is part of the reason Go compiles incredibly fast. It does not re-include the same header files multiple times, the way C++ does. Go also has built-in memory safety, and a garbage collector handles clean-up of unused memory. The standard library in Go is pretty impressive too. It is modern and contains networking, HTTP, TLS, XML, JSON, database, image manipulation, and cryptography packages. Go also supports Unicode, allowing all kinds of characters to be used in source code.
The Go toolchain is central to the ecosystem. It provides tools to download and install remote dependencies, run unit tests and benchmarks, generate code, and format code according to the Go formatting standards. It also includes the compiler, linker, and assembler, which compile very quickly and also allow for easy cross-compiling by simply changing the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables.
Some features were excluded from the Go language. Generics, inheritance, assertions, exceptions, pointer arithmetic, and implicit type conversions were all left out of Go. Many features were omitted intentionally, namely generics, assertions, and pointer arithmetic. The authors left out some features because they wanted to maintain performance, keep the language specification as simple as possible, or they could not agree on the best way to implement, or because a feature was too controversial. Inheritance was also left out intentionally in favor of using interfaces and composition instead. Some other features, such as generics, were left out because there was too much debate concerning their proper implementation, but they may show up in Go 2.0. The authors recognized that it is much easier to add a feature to a language than to take one away.