The Go programming language is an open source project to make programmers more productive. Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language. The tools are added to the path by putting go.sh and go.csh files in /etc/profile.d and letting the system's /etc/profile or /etc/csh.login pick it up. If you want to add any of Go's environment variables you can add them there. Also, to easily setup a user-independent path for Go libraries to be installed to and used, is the GOPATH environment variable. This variable can be colon delimited. For example, once installing the built google-go-lang package, then set in your user's ~/.bashrc something like: export GOPATH="$HOME/src/go" Then, you'll be able to use the `go` command to install an additional library that will not need root permission and will be in the compiler's path. Like so: go get labix.org/v2/mgo Now in ~/src/go, you'll have this library available!