Google's programming language Go has become stable enough for its first formal release, called Go 1. Will Go help you develop more quickly? Tell us what you think below. After it was first released in 2009, Google described Go as an attempt to combine the development speed of a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. And they wanted it to be easy to use. This is the first release to support binary distributions, which are available in Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows. The language also integrates with Google's App Engine cloud platform. According to the Go blog:

People who write Go 1 programs can be confident that those programs will continue to compile and run without change, in many environments, on a time scale of years. Similarly, authors who write books about Go 1 can be sure that their examples and explanations will be helpful to readers today and into the future.

Go is part of Google's attempts to make Web programming simpler and more sophisticated. PC World explains that Google wants advanced engineering for the Web while not totally confounding novices. Yet InfoWorld notes that Google's programming languages haven't gained as much traction as the languages of Oracle and Microsoft. In the most recent monthly Tiobe Programming Community Index, the Go language fell out of the top 50, while Google's Dart language was ranked 78th. In the RedMonk programming language rankings from February, Go sat squarely in the middle of the chart.