Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. - Golang.org

Go has no implicit numeric conversions, no constructors or destructors, no operator overloading, no default parameter values, no inheritance, no generics, no exceptions, no macros, no function annotations, and no thread-local storage. - The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan A. A. Donovan

• Go is general purpose programming language.
• Go is compiled language.
• Go is more type safe than C,C++.
• Go is strongly typed language.
• Go has static type checking.
• Go needs manifest typing. Compiler has to know each type at compile time.
• Go compiler can also perform type inference in many cases.
• Go has duck typing like features like interfaces.
• Overall Go is extremely simple, expressive and powerful.

• slow builds
• uncontrolled dependencies
• each programmer using a different subset of the language
• poor program understanding (code hard to read, poorly documented, and so on)
• duplication of effort
• cost of updates
• version skew
• difficulty of writing automatic tools
• cross-language builds

In a nutshell, we wanted a language with the safety and performance of statically compiled languages such as C++ and Java, but the lightness and fun of dynamically typed interpreted languages such as Python - Rob Pike