C vs Go: Rating, Votes and Features
- License: C — Open standard; Go — BSD-3-Clause.
- Paradigms: C — Procedural; Go — Concurrent, Procedural.
- Memory management: C — Manual; Go — Garbage collected.
C — November 2026: 2 votes, rating 7.3/10.
Go — November 2026: 5 votes, rating 7.1/10.
| C | Go | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | programming language | programming language |
| Developer | ISO C committee (WG14) | |
| Created by | Dennis Ritchie | Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson |
| First release | 1972 | 2009 |
| License | Open standard | BSD-3-Clause |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| Website | https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14 | https://go.dev |
| Paradigms | Procedural | Concurrent, Procedural |
| Typing | Static | Static |
| Type strength | Weak | Strong |
| Type inference | No | Yes |
| Memory management | Manual | Garbage collected |
| Runs as | Native code | Native code |
| Main implementation | GCC, Clang, MSVC | gc, the Go toolchain |
| Concurrency | Threads (C11 threads, POSIX threads), atomics | Goroutines and channels |
| Null safety | No | No |
| Package manager | None | Go modules |
| Used for | Embedded, Systems | Back end, Systems |
| Specification | ISO/IEC 9899 | The Go Programming Language Specification |