What Is so Great About Golang?
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What Is so Great About Golang?
@olgagalikOlga Galik
I've always been fascinated with technology and am happy to share Uptech’s experience with the IT community.
Over the decades, many different programming languages were introduced. Some become permanent fixtures with the developer community, while others faded unnoticed. One that falls in the former category is Golang.
Golang has captured developers’ attention since its inception. Today, it is widely used by many companies to power their backend services. If you’re asking why you should use Golang, you’ll find the answers in this article.
What Is Golang?
Golang was developed by Google in 2009. It is an open-source programming language based on C but enhanced with memory management, strict typing, garbage collection, and built to handle concurrency. It fixes problems that are notorious for C-programmers, where failure to release unused objects leads to memory leakage.
Codes in Golang are compiled directly to machine codes, offering the much-needed execution speed for back-end development. It was adopted by the likes of Uber, Twitter, and Dropbox despite being a relatively young programming language.
In 2020, Golang became the top language that professionals wanted to learn, according to a survey by HackerEarth. It isn’t surprising given the advantages that Golang brings to the table.
Advantages of using Golang
Golang Is Fast
The fact that Golang compiles directly to machine code shouldn’t go unnoticed. Unlike languages like Java, Golang doesn’t need an interpreter for the applications to run. This translates into faster execution due to the absence of an intermediary process.
Various tests have been done to pit Golang with Java with consistent results. Golang always edges the latter in terms of execution speed. Not only do Golang programs run at top speed, but the compilation process is also a breeze.
It isn’t hard to see why developers adopted Golang, given the increasing demand for faster back-end applications.
Growing Pool Of Talent
Being a much faster and simpler language, more developers are picking up Golang. Today, there are more than 1 million developers proficient in Golang. The number is expected to grow in the immediate future. For companies, it means that there’s an abundance of talent to hire from when developing applications with Golang.
Golang also has an active community on StackOverflow. The active discussion on StackOverflow is a good sign that you’ll enjoy good community support when adopting Golang. Good community support is important for the sustainability of any programming language.
Comprehensive Programing Tools
One of the obstacles for new programming languages is the lack of tools support. Thankfully, Golang doesn’t suffer from this problem. While it doesn’t have tens of thousands of 3rd party tools like Java, Go has a set of comprehensive tools that makes code development easier.
Go provides a few IDE and editor to work with. Visual Studio Code and Goland are two commonly used IDE for Golang programming. Meanwhile, documentation in Golang is never easier when you’re using GoDoc, a tool that automatically generates documentation from Golang source code.
Tools like Golint and Gofmt are helpful static analysis tools to ensure that your source code is up to Golang’s programming standard. Golang supports concurrency, which also subject it to the hazard of race condition. Developers is aided to by the Race Detector tool to preempt such issues from occurring.
Golang Is Well-Scaled
Scalability is an important criterial when choosing a programming language. You don’t want to end up with bottlenecks when you’re expanding the application. Golang is built with scalability in mind.
Golang makes concurrency which allows various functions to be executed simultaneously. This is made possible with GoRoutine, which are non-blocking and consumers very little resources. Multiple GoRoutines can run concurrently and independently from each other.
Using Golang leads to a stable system, particularly when the app is scaled upwards to cater for growing usage. You can stick to a single programming language throughout the entire application’s growth..
Golang Is Easy To Learn
Some programming languages takes weeks to pickup. With Golang , a beginner can easily understand the syntax within hours. Golang is built to resemble C, and that means you don’t get overwhelmed by syntaxes and variables.
Experienced programmers will find learning Golang a breeze, compared to more difficult languages. Not only that, it is also easy to read and troubleshoot someone else’s code with Go once you’ve grasp the basics of the language.
Golang’s shallow learning curve means it’s easy to train current developers on the new language. It’s also easier maintain existing applications with different Golang developers.
Summary
Golang’s simplicity, speed, scalability, and great support means that it is here to stay. Companies are moving away from older languages in favor of Golang and the reasons are obvious. If you’re building backend services and tools, the go-to language is now Golang.
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