When it comes to products from Google, users have come to expect groundbreaking innovative revelations. Go, a programming language designed by Google, has not made that mark quite yet.

At the very basic level, Go is a remake of object-oriented C, but it does have some interesting features. Designed primarily with Google programmers in mind, it is capable of massive scaling and is optimized for multi-core processors that handle parallel multi-tasks. Although it has not been used in any of Google’s commercial applications so far, it is expected to do so in the near future. Go features an extremely fast compiler and code that runs as fast as C. It is not a language for beginners and its learning curve can be put on par with that of Java. The object-oriented language also features functions such as true closures and reflection.

Go began life in 2007 as a “group 20%” project. Projects that lie outside usual responsibilities of a Google employee are titled “group 20%” projects. Employees can devote 20 percent of their time to work on these if they wish to do so. Full development of Go only began in 2008.

Go gained the most market share in 2009 and in response to this, was awarded TIOBE’s Programming Language of the Year 2009. The incredible rise that Go has experienced may have a lot to do with hype, but then again Google products have more success stories than failures. The development and updates will of course dictate how far and powerful the language becomes. For now, it is an exciting new language, which is fun to experiment with and holds many possibilities.