Go (aka Golang) came to life at Google in 2009. It was designed by a few big names:
- Robert Griesemer, who had a large hand in the development of the Java Virtual Machine.
- Rob Pike, who holds the U.S. patent for windowing UI systems as well as helped build the Plan 9 operating system at Bell Labs. (In fact, the mascots for Plan 9 and for Golang are remarkably similar because Pike’s wife, Renée French, is a renowned illustrator.)
- Ken Thompson, who designed and implemented a little thing called Unix.
In this article, we’ll demonstrate how simple it is to build a RESTful web service in Go. Then, we’ll demonstrate how to deploy this application with Heroku. But before we embark on this journey, let’s talk briefly about why you might want to use Go.