Downloadable at , the open source Go language has been positioned as a general-purpose language suitable for uses ranging from application development to systems programming and offering such features as garbage collection and concurrency. It also is intended to be easy to program.

Go 1 is the first release supporting binary distributions, which are available in Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows. The language also integrates with Google's App Engine cloud platform.

"The driving motivation for Go 1 is stability for its users. 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," according to a post from Go team member Andrew Gerrand on the .

Google also is striving for forward compatibility; version 1 is a representation of Go as it is used today and is not a major redesign, Gerrand said. But it does introduce changes such as new types for Unicode characters and errors. The package hierarchy has been rearranged to group related items together.