Google’s Genkit for Go brings AI app development to Go language

Google has unveiled Genkit for Go, an open-source framework for building AI-powered applications and cloud services natively in Go. The project is a collaboration between Google’s Firebase and Go language teams.

Introduced July 17 and currently in an alpha state, Genkit for Go enables developers to build generative AI applications by combining Go’s performance and concurrency advantages with Genkit’s libraries and tools. Potential use cases include intelligent assistants that understand complex requests, customer support agents using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and data transformation tools that convert unstructured data such as natural language into structured formats (SQL, queries, tables) for deeper analysis.

A guide to getting started with Genkit for Go can be found at firebase.google.com. Genkit for Go follows the May introduction of Firebase Genkit for Node.js, for JavaScript and TypeScript developers. Genkit provides lightweight, composable abstractions to simplify development of sophisticated AI workflows without sacrificing control and customizability, Google said. The framework features:

• A unified generation API, for generating content from models such as Gemini or Gemma via a single interface.
• Flows for AI workflows, providing functions offering built-in observability for monitoring and debugging.
• Native vector database support, to make AI models context-aware by integrating RAG into applications with indexing and retrieval APIs working across database providers.
• Dotprompt, a file format to streamline the prompt engineering process.

Genkit for Go is billed as a lightweight, provider-agnostic framework. A collection of plugins is offered to integrate with specific models, vector databases, and cloud services from Google and third-party providers. The Genkit CLI and browser-based developer UI offer a toolkit to streamline generative AI development. Developers using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor or Google’s Project IDX cloud IDE can open the Genkit developer UI in the IDE’s integrated browser, for use side-by-side with code.

Developers can file issues and feature requests for Genkit for Go on GitHub. Google on July 17 also rolled out other tools including Project Oscar, a reference architecture for an AI agent.