| # Six years of Go | |
| 10 Nov 2015 | |
| Summary: Happy 6th birthday, Go! | |
| Andrew Gerrand | |
| adg@golang.org | |
| ## | |
| Six years ago today the Go language was released as an open source project. | |
| Since then, more than 780 contributors have made over 30,000 commits to the | |
| project's 22 repositories. The ecosystem continues to grow, with GitHub | |
| reporting more than 90,000 Go repositories. And, offline, we see new Go events | |
| and user groups pop up [around](https://blog.golang.org/gophercon2015) | |
| [the](https://blog.golang.org/gouk15) | |
| [world](https://blog.golang.org/gopherchina) with regularity. | |
| .image 6years/6years-gopher.png | |
| In August we [released Go 1.5](https://blog.golang.org/go1.5), the most | |
| significant release since Go 1. It features a completely | |
| [redesigned garbage collector](https://golang.org/doc/go1.5#gc) that makes | |
| the language more suitable for latency-sensitive applications; it marks the | |
| transition from a C-based compiler tool chain to one | |
| [written entirely in Go](https://golang.org/doc/go1.5#c); and it includes | |
| ports to [new architectures](https://golang.org/doc/go1.5#ports), with better | |
| support for ARM processors (the chips that power most smartphones). | |
| These improvements make Go better suited to a broader range of tasks, a trend | |
| that we hope will continue over the coming years. | |
| Improvements to tools continue to boost developer productivity. | |
| We introduced the [execution tracer](https://golang.org/cmd/trace/) and the | |
| "[go doc](https://golang.org/cmd/go/#hdr-Show_documentation_for_package_or_symbol)" | |
| command, as well as more enhancements to our various | |
| [static analysis tools](https://talks.golang.org/2014/static-analysis.slide). | |
| We are also working on an | |
| [official Go plugin for Sublime Text](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Golang-nuts/8oCSjAiKXUQ), | |
| with better support for other editors in the pipeline. | |
| Early next year we will release more improvements in Go 1.6, including | |
| HTTP/2 support for [net/http](https://golang.org/pkg/net/http/) servers and | |
| clients, an official package vendoring mechanism, support for blocks in text | |
| and HTML templates, a memory sanitizer that checks both Go and C/C++ code, and | |
| the usual assortment of other improvements and fixes. | |
| This is the sixth time we have had the pleasure of writing a birthday blog post | |
| for Go, and we would not be doing so if not for the wonderful and passionate | |
| people in our community. The Go team would like to thank everyone who has | |
| contributed code, written an open source library, authored a blog post, helped | |
| a new gopher, or just given Go a try. Without you, Go would not be as complete, | |
| useful, or successful as it is today. Thank you, and celebrate! |