Programming language Go, initially developed at Google, has just moved to GitHub.
Go, a language loosely based on C that is used in some of Google’s production systems, was hosted on GitHub competitor Mercurial until Thursday. Rob Pike, Google engineer and lead designer and contributor at Go, explained the decision on Go’s message board.
“Mercurial has served us well, but it’s time to move on,” Pike wrote. “The world today is quite different from the world then. Most members of the Go community use Git and host their work on GitHub, and we should join them.”
Go will join dozens of other Google projects already hosted on GitHub, including Dart. It will also be following Microsoft’s decision earlier this week to open source its programming framework .NET and host it on GitHub.
GitHub, a repository hosting service based on the version control software Git, now hosts more than 17 million repositories from companies like Twitter and major open source projects like Ruby on Rails. The real winner of the day is GitHub, a Ycombinator commenter noted:
“Google hosting Go on GitHub. Microsoft hosting .NET on GitHub. It must feel like an accomplishment to be implicitly endorsed by these companies.”
