Hello, Go

Go (often called Golang) was built at Google to be simple, fast to compile, and easy to run at scale, it deliberately has a small feature set compared to languages like C++ or Java, that's a design goal, not a limitation.

Your first program

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, Kodstigen!")
}

• Every Go file belongs to a package, package main marks this one as an executable program's entry point (as opposed to a reusable library package).
• import "fmt" brings in the formatting/printing package, Go's standard library is organized into small, focused packages like this.
• func main() is where execution starts, no class wrapper needed, unlike Java.

Compiling and running

go run main.go     # compile and run in one step, good for development
go build main.go   # produce a standalone binary called main (or main.exe)
./main

Go compiles to a single, statically-linked binary with no external runtime required, you can copy that one file to another machine and run it, nothing else needs to be installed.