During its eight-plus years in the wild, Google’s Go language—with version 1.8.1 out as of April 2017—has evolved from being a curiosity for alpha geeks to being the battle-tested programming language behind some of the world’s most important cloud-centric projects.
Why was Go chosen by the developers of such projects as Docker and Kubernetes? What are Go’s defining characteristics, how does it differ from other programming languages, and what kinds of projects is it most suitable for building?
