Short-duration gamma-ray bursts (short-GRBs) are thought to be produced during the merger ofcompact binary stars involving at least one neutron star. The recent detection of a gravitational wave signal coincident with a short-GRB (170817), albeit one with unusually low intrinsic luminosity, has cemented this link and opened a new era of multimessenger astrophysics. Long-duration gamma-ray bursts are produced by the core collapse of envelope-stripped massive stars, which may also be the end product of binary evolution. Establishing the nature of the long-GRB progenitor more definitely is important not only for our understanding of GRBs, but also for their use as probes of the distant Universe, many of which depend on how representative GRBs are of the general population of massive stars.