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diff --git a/content/2years.article b/content/2years.article new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6dd1852 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/2years.article @@ -0,0 +1,76 @@ +# The Go Programming Language turns two +10 Nov 2011 +Tags: appengine, community, gopher +Summary: Happy 2nd birthday, Go! +OldURL: /go-programming-language-turns-two + +Andrew Gerrand + +## + +Two years ago a small team at Google went public with their fledgling project - +the Go Programming Language. +They presented a language spec, two compilers, +a modest standard library, some novel tools, +and plenty of accurate (albeit succinct) documentation. +They watched with excitement as programmers around the world began to play with Go. +The team continued to iterate and improve on what they had built, +and were gradually joined by dozens - and then hundreds - of programmers +from the open source community. +The Go Authors went on to produce lots of libraries, +new tools, and reams of [documentation](https://golang.org/doc/docs.html). +They celebrated a successful year in the public eye with a [blog post](https://blog.golang.org/2010/11/go-one-year-ago-today.html) +last November that concluded "Go is certainly ready for production use, +but there is still room for improvement. +Our focus for the immediate future is making Go programs faster and more +efficient in the context of high performance systems." + +Today is the second anniversary of Go's release, +and Go is faster and more stable than ever. +Careful tuning of Go's code generators, concurrency primitives, +garbage collector, and core libraries have increased the performance of Go programs, +and native support for [profiling](https://blog.golang.org/2011/06/profiling-go-programs.html) +and [debugging](http://blog.golang.org/2011/10/debugging-go-programs-with-gnu-debugger.html) +makes it easier to detect and remove performance issues in user code. +Go is also now easier to learn with [A Tour of Go](http://tour.golang.org/), +an interactive tutorial you can take from the comfort of your web browser. + +This year we introduced the experimental [Go runtime](http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/) +for Google's App Engine platform, +and we have been steadily increasing the Go runtime's support for App Engine's APIs. +Just this week we released [version 1.6.0](http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html) +of the Go App Engine SDK, +which includes support for [backends](http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/go/backends/overview.html) +(long-running processes), +finer control over datastore indexes, and various other improvements. +Today, the Go runtime is near feature parity with - and is a viable alternative +to - the Python and Java runtimes. +In fact, we now serve [golang.org](https://golang.org/) by running a version +of [godoc](https://golang.org/cmd/godoc/) on the App Engine service. + +While 2010 was a year of discovery and experimentation, +2011 was a year of fine tuning and planning for the future. +This year we issued several "[release](https://golang.org/doc/devel/release.html)" +versions of Go that were more reliable and better supported than weekly snapshots. +We also introduced [gofix](https://golang.org/cmd/gofix/) to take the +pain out of migrating to newer releases. +Furthermore, last month we announced a [plan for Go version 1](https://blog.golang.org/2011/10/preview-of-go-version-1.html) - +a release that will be supported for years to come. +Work toward Go 1 is already underway and you can observe our progress by +the latest weekly snapshot at [weekly.golang.org](http://weekly.golang.org/pkg/). + +The plan is to launch Go 1 in early 2012. +We hope to bring the Go App Engine runtime out of "experimental" status at the same time. + +But that's not all. 2011 was an exciting year for the gopher, too. +He has manifested himself as a plush toy (a highly prized gift at Google +I/O and other Go talks) and in vinyl form (received by every attendee at +OSCON and now available at the [Google Store](http://www.googlestore.com/Fun/Go+Gopher+Figurine.axd)). + +.image 2years/2years-gophers.jpg + +And, most surprisingly, at Halloween he made an appearance with his gopher girlfriend! + +.image 2years/2years-costume.jpg + +Photograph by [Chris Nokleberg](https://plus.google.com/106640494112897458359/posts). |