Why Choose Go for Next Project?

Infected-Engineers
Golang
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Introduction

Greetings for the day Infected Engineers!!

Today, I would like to discuss why Golang can be the best programming language for your next project. Before that let’s have a look at brief about Golang.

Golang is a general purpose programming language developed by Google in 2007 which is open sourced and available publicly in 2009. It is designed to solve problems Google was facing with other languages such as C++ and Java in large distributed networks. However, Golang is general purpose programming language and you can develop CLI utilities to microservices with it.

It is enough introduction to Golang, time to go through the characteristics that made Golang not only efficient but also popular.

Characteristics of Golang

Go is a simple yet powerful programming language that comes with a range of features. Some of these features include:

  • Simplicity

    Google wanted a language which should be easy to learn and has a very thin learning curve. Keeping that in mind creators design Golang to be simple, concise and efficient at the same time. There are just 25 keywords in Go and those are enough to develop a production grade application.

  • Concurrency

    Golang implemented the easiest concurrency model Go Routine with Channels. You can leverage the power of modern CPUs with Go’s concurrency support to develop a concurrent application easily.

  • Garbage Collection

    It is assumed that the language that supports garbage collection introduces overhead which makes program slower. Whilst it is not entirely true, the Go’s modern garbage collector is designed to be efficient and minimize overhead as much as possible.

  • Fast compilation

    As we said earlier, Go is designed to solve issues that Google was facing with other languages. One of them was slow compilation speed of programs of other languages.

  • Cross-platform

    Although, it is not new and there are lots of other languages that support cross-compilation. Such as Java, C language also support cross compilation but Go is one step ahead, and its built-in tools support cross-compilation natively. Unlike Java, you will never need any external runtime to run Go program. Similarly, unlike C you will never face any issues like some functions are not available on different platforms.

Use Cases of Go

So, you’ve learned about all the amazing features that Golang provides. Now, let’s take a look at the types of applications you can develop using this incredible language.

Believe it or not, Go is like a Swiss Army knife for programming! It can be used in a whole range of application development scenarios.

Check out these cool use cases for Go:

  • Web development
  • Cloud Native Development
  • Network programming
  • System Programming
  • Command Line Interface (CLI)

Common misconception about Go

Go concurrency is difficult

It is a misconception that Go provides a completed concurrency mechanism the truth is, it is far easier as compared to other languages such as C++, Java and Python.

Golang has a concept to develop concurrent applications known as GoRoutines. It is a lightweight thread managed by Go’s runtime environment. The initial stack size of a goroutine is just 2 KB which grows and shrinks as needed without the risk of running out of memory.

For intercommunication between goroutines, Golang has mechanism called channels. You can consider channels as tunnels between goroutines. Together, this concurrent mechanism is very easy to develop and maintain.

The most important point is Go built for multicore processors to perform tasks in distributed computing environment.

Go has slow garbage collector

Every time we run any program it performs some kind of calculations to execute the instructions. The memory needed for the computation is unknown at compile time, memory is allocated during run time dynamically.

The dynamic allocation uses a separate partition of memory called Heap Memory. Once the calculation is done this memory should be free. Until that, we can say it becomes garbage. In case of languages that have garbage collectors programmer has to leave the responsibility to reclaim the unused memory.

The process of collecting memory that is no longer being used is called Garbage Collection And the system which performs this process is known as Garbage Collector.

The programming languages that has garbage collector are said to be slow because most of the time is wasted in garbage collection process. Go is something different because it has an efficient and optimized garbage collector.

It is true that some of the operations can be performed more efficiently and fast in C or C++ but Go is fast compared to other languages that has garbage collector.

Go is scripting language

Most developers consider Golang as scripting language which is not true about Go. It is not scripting language it is a compiled language. Go’s source code is compiled into the byte code that developer can execute later.

However, there are ways to execute Go as script similar to Python scripts. Well, it is out of scope of this post. If you are interested in knowing how to do that you can find useful tutorials online.

Go cannot be used for system programming

This point is not straightforward to elaborate easily. In most of the cases, Golang can be used for system programming. In few cases, C, or Rust can be better choice for system programming.

Golang comes with a rich set of standard library packages that make it easy to perform low-level tasks. Such as io or os packages can be used to interact with file system and operating system’s tasks respectively.

Other examples are syscall and net package. syscall contains an interface to low-level operating system primitives.

Why choose Go for next project

Fast

Golang is compiled language. Its source code gets converted into the byte code. The compilation process of Go is faster than C, C++, Java and many other languages.

Go has garbage collector (GC) which is optimized for speed and it is fast as compared to Java GC.

Easy to learn

Go is simple and easy to learn. It has 25 keywords only. Most of the syntax has been adopted from C and C++ rest are from Python.

Actually, the developers of Golang wanted a language that should be concise and should have very thin learning curve. A developer with any level of experience can get better with Go in just couple of weeks.

You can go through the official introductory documentation. It is not more than 50 pages.

Scalable

Think about it Google designed Golang to solve the problems that it was facing with other languages in large distributed network applications. Just imagine if Golang is solution to this kind of problem then how scalable it can be.

Similarly, you can think of the most popular DevOps tools, almost every tool is developed in Go. Ex: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus

Designed for Muti-Core

Golang is designed to work with multicore systems efficiently. Keeping that in mind it provides a developer very easy way to do so.

The other languages such as C, C++, Java and Python were designed before the multi-core systems were not so popular and any system does not need that heavy-duty multicore system to run online services.

Golang was designed in the era when large systems performing huge online tasks were very common. Its design & feature makes working with multi-core far easier.

In-Demand

Go is very popular among start-ups and it is in-demand among top giants such as Google, Uber, Netflix, SoundCloud, and Twitch.

Google products which proof that it is so much in demand:

  • Chrome Content Optimization Service Runs on Go
  • Google’s Core Data Solutions Team Uses Go
  • Firebase Hosting Team Scaled With Go
  • Google’s Site Reliability Engineering Team Uses

For more information on above points, you can visit Go’s office blog.

Open Source

Go is open source meaning that you would get a lot of community support and tools. If you want and have capability you can even contribute to Go’s source code.

There are lots of online docs and tutorials available which makes it easy for a new comer to learn Golang. Everything is free to use and you can ask for help on any forum.

Summary

Golang is a general purpose programming language It is designed to solve problems Google was facing with other languages such as C++ and Java in large distributed networks. However, Golang is a general purpose programming language and you can develop CLI utilities for microservices with it.

Go is a simple yet powerful programming language that comes with a range of features such as simplicity, fast compilation, garbage collection, concurrency and cross-platform.

Golang can be used in whole range of applications such as Web development, Cloud Native Development, Network programming, System programming, and Command Line Interface (CLI).

You can consider Go for your next project because Go is fast, efficient, easy to learn, scalable, and provides an easy concurrency mechanism. There are Go uses in Google which prove Golang is so much powerful such as Chrome Content Optimization Service which is developed in Go.