Google has been toiling away on the Go Project since 2009. Besides having one of the most adorable mascots ever – Tux had better step up his game – Go is the company’s open source programming language. After three years and over 200 people contributing to the project, the Go Project has reached a major milestone.

Andrew Gerrand of the Go Team, not to be confused with the other Go Team, Google+Open+Source+Blog%29″>updated us today on the status of the Go Project. It has reached a stable enough point now to be considered usable by the masses and thus has earned the moniker “Go Version 1” or just “Go 1” for short.

Go promises a few things as a programming language. The first and most important is that programs built in Go 1 will continue to work even as Go continues to evolve as a language. This means that even when Go 1 becomes Go 1.3, programs built in Go 1 should still work in the new runtime.

For those who were using Go on the Google App Engine, Go 1 is now the official Go runtime on the platform. Go 1 is also available in binary distributions including Linux, FreeBSD, Mas OSX and Windows.

If you have no idea what Go is, head on over to the official Go site and check out Go for yourself. They have an interactive demo set up on the front page that allows you to write simple code in Go showing off its unicode support and other functions.