No introduction to any language is complete without the canonical Hello World program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world). This programs starts off by defining a package called main, then imports the standard Go input/output formatting package (fmt), and lastly, defines the main function, which is the standard entry point for every Go program. The main function here just outputs Hello World!:

package main

import "fmt"

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

Go was designed with the explicit object of having clean, minimal code. Hence, compared to other languages in the C family, its grammar is modest in size, with about 25 keywords.

Go statements are generally C-like, and most of the primitives should feel familiar to programmers accustomed to languages such as C and Java. This makes it easy for non-Go developers to pick up things quickly. That said, Go makes many changes to C semantics, mostly to avoid the reliability pitfalls associated with low-level resource management (that is, memory allocation, pointer arithmetic, and implicit conversions), with the aim of increasing robustness. Also, despite syntactical similarity, Go introduces many modern constructs, including concurrency and garbage collection.