Go (Golang) is a statically typed, compiled programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. At version 1.26 (February 2026), it features built-in concurrency primitives, fast compilation, and the new Green Tea garbage collector, making it ideal for scalable network services, cloud infrastructure, and CLI tools. The language favors composition over inheritance, explicit error handling, and — since Go 1.18 — generics with type parameters. Understanding Go's approach to concurrency through goroutines and channels, combined with a growing standard library including the slices, maps, cmp, and iter packages, enables developers to write efficient programs that compile to self-contained binaries.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 37 focused tables and 298 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Basic Types and Declarations
| Type | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
var flag bool = true | • Boolean value, either true or false• zero value is false. | |
var count int = 42 | • Signed integers • int is platform-dependent (32 or 64 bit), others are fixed-size. | |
var age uint8 = 25 | • Unsigned integers • uint8 is alias for byte, commonly used for raw data. | |
var pi float64 = 3.14159 | • Floating-point numbers • prefer float64 for most use cases due to precision. | |
var name string = "Go" | • Immutable UTF-8 byte sequence • length is byte count, not character count. |