Go was designed at Google from 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson as a reaction to slow builds and complex C++ code. It was announced as open source in November 2009, and Go 1.0 arrived in 2012 with a promise that Go 1 programs would keep compiling.
Fast compilation, a single static binary and goroutines made Go the language of cloud infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform and Prometheus are all written in Go. A new release comes out every February and August, and the two most recent releases receive security fixes. Modules (2018) and generics (2022) were the biggest changes since 1.0.