Install go with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• go
• gofmt

Project history

Go was designed at Google beginning in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson to improve programming productivity for multicore, networked machines and large codebases. The project was launched to the public on 10 November 2009 as an open source language focused on simplicity and efficiency.

Go 1 was released on 28 March 2012 and established the compatibility promise that programs written for Go 1 should continue to compile and run under later Go 1 releases. That stability turned the experimental public release into a predictable platform for application code, libraries, and distribution packaging.

Adoption history

The Go team described strong early community growth after the 2009 launch, including external contributors, mailing-list activity, and adoption both inside Google and by outside companies. By the project's tenth anniversary, Go's official blog described adoption across cloud infrastructure, naming Docker, Etcd, Istio, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Terraform as examples of core cloud software written in Go.

How it is used

Practitioners use the go command to create modules, fetch dependencies, build, test, install commands, run programs, and maintain go.mod and go.sum files. A module's go.mod file defines the module path, Go version, and dependency requirements, while Go commands such as go mod tidy and go get keep those requirements consistent.

Go's toolchain model made the package more than a compiler binary. The distribution includes the go command plus a bundled toolchain made up of the standard library, compiler, assembler, and other tools; beginning with Go 1.21, the go command can also select or download toolchains according to go and toolchain lines in a module or workspace.

Why package nerds care

The brew:go formula is a foundational language-runtime package on macOS and Linux because it installs the canonical go command and gofmt formatter used to build Go software and many other Homebrew formulas from source.

Timeline

• 2007: Go design work began at Google.
• 2009: Go was launched as an open source project.
• 2012: Go 1 was released with the long-term compatibility promise.
• 2018: Go 1.11 introduced preliminary module support.
• 2021: Go 1.16 made module-aware mode the default and added //go:embed.
• 2023: Go 1.21 introduced automatic toolchain selection in the go command.

Related projects

• Go's ecosystem includes pkg.go.dev, the standard library, the module proxy and checksum database, the x/tools repository, and large cloud-native projects such as Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus, Docker, Etcd, and Istio.

Sources

• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/go
• https://go.dev/blog/10years
• https://go.dev/blog/1year
• https://go.dev/blog/modules2019
• https://go.dev/doc/devel/release
• https://go.dev/doc/modules/gomod-ref
• https://go.dev/doc/toolchain
• https://go.googlesource.com/go