Go is a fast statically typed, compiled high-level general purpose programming language. It is known for its simplicity and efficiency. It was designed at Google in 2009 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is syntactically similar to C, but also has memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-style concurrency. It is often referred to as Golang because of its former domain name, golang.org, but its proper name is Go.
There are two major implementations:
The original, self-hosting compiler toolchain, initially developed inside Google;
A frontend written in C++, called gofrontend, originally a GCC frontend, providing gccgo, a GCC-based Go compiler; later extended to also support LLVM, providing an LLVM-based Go compiler called gollvm.
A third-party source-to-source compiler, GopherJS, compiles Go to JavaScript for front-end web development.
