Introduction

Go is an open source project, distributed under a BSD-style license. This document explains how to check out the sources, build them on your own machine, and run them.
There are two distinct ways to experiment with Go. This document focuses on the gc Go compiler and tools (6g, 8g etc.). For information on how to use gccgo, a more traditional compiler using the GCC back end, see Setting up and using gccgo.

Community resources

For real-time help, there may be users or developers on #go-nuts on the Freenode IRC server.
The official mailing list for discussion of the Go language is Go Nuts.
Bugs can be reported using the Go issue tracker.
For those who wish to keep up with development, there is another mailing list, golang-checkins, that receives a message summarizing each checkin to the Go repository.