Before we delve into Golang’s nitty-gritty, let’s take a look at some numbers, shall we? According to JetBrains Developer’s Survey Report of 2020, Golang ranked 7 among the top 10 most popular programming languages.
The reports also found that 71% of Go developers developed microservices with it which made it the second most popular language for the purpose after Scala. Another Developer Survey Report of 2022 (conducted by Stack Overflow) saw almost 10K JavaScript developers wanting to start or continue development in Go.
So, welcome to the world of Golang, (fondly called Go) a potent, resourceful, and growing programming language developed and supported by our own favorite search engine giant, Google.
Whether you’re a beginner just starting on your coding journey or you’re a seasoned developer, Golang offers a refreshing approach to creating scalable, fast, and robust applications.
With its focus on performance, simplicity, and concurrency, Go has quickly gained popularity and has grown to become a favorite of developers. This post is dedicated to the power of Golang as it delves into its many aspects including its key features and benefits that highlight its immense potential. So let’s begin.
WHAT IS GOLANG?
Golang or Go is a high-level, open-source programming language that was developed by a team at Google. Though inclined towards static typing, it combines features from both static and structural typing languages, striving to provide a balance between ease of use and efficient execution.
Golang was designed to address the challenges faced in modern software development, with its core focus on simplicity and concurrency. Go’s key objective is to make it easy for developers to write highly efficient and reliable code which it does via its clean and readable syntax.
It also emphasizes clarity and explicitness and promotes good coding practices, thereby encouraging code readability, maintainability, and efficient resource utilization.
Key Features of Golang
The secret behind all its powers lies in its powerful and competent features. Let’s have a look at some of Go’s key features.
– Static Typing
Golang is statically typed, which means that variable types are checked at compile-time. This helps in catching errors in the early phases of app development and improves code reliability.
Its type system is expressive and it supports features like interfaces, structs, and composition enabling developers to write clean and maintainable code.
– Garbage Collection
Golang facilitates automatic memory management through garbage collection. The language’s garbage collector relieves developers from manual memory allocation and de-allocation of tasks. This in turn reduces the risk of memory leaks and memory-related errors.
– Concurrency and Goroutines
Golang was created from the ground up for facilitating concurrency and parallelism. It has built-in support for concurrency with goroutines and channels. Goroutines are lightweight threads that allow concurrent execution of functions, which makes it easy for developers to write highly concurrent programs.
The simplicity and efficiency of goroutines help in the proper utilization of multi-core processors.
– Strong, Standard Library
Golang comes with an extensive and rich standard library that provides programmers with a wide range of packages for accomplishing tasks like networking, cryptography, file manipulation, parsing, and more.
The standard library follows the Go philosophy of simplicity and consistency and offers robust and well-tested functionality out of the box. Thanks to the standard library, developers don’t need to rely on external libraries for common programming tasks.
– Readable Syntax
Golang has a clean, minimalistic, and readable syntax. It avoids unnecessary complexity and focuses on straightforward language constructs, making it easier for developers to write and understand code. It focuses on code clarity and encourages explicitness over implicitness.
Golang’s syntax also reduces boilerplate and encourages good coding practices, thereby making it approachable for developers of different backgrounds.
– Efficient Compilation and Fast Execution
Another big feature of Golang is its efficient compilation. Golang compiles directly to machine code which results in fast execution. Since the compilation process is fast, it enables quick feedback during development. Its efficient execution makes it well-suited for apps that demand high performance and low latency.
– Cross-Platform Support
Golang supports cross-platform development allowing developers to write code once and run it on different operating systems. Its compiler generates native executables for each target platform, ensuring consistency in performance and behavior across all platforms.
The language is also supported on almost all major platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux, ensuring that Golang applications can be deployed across different environments without major modifications.
– Thriving Ecosystem and Growing Community
Golang’s ecosystem is thriving, with a passionate community that actively contributes to creating more libraries, frameworks, and tools that expand Golang’s capabilities for different domains and use cases. Its tooling ecosystem consists of a variety of development tools, IDEs, and package managers too.
Whether you’re building web applications, microservices, network utilities, or system-level software, you’ll find a growing collection of resources and support to help you along your development journey.
Golang’s list of features isn’t limited to the ones mentioned above but the listed features are significant enough to make it a powerful and versatile programming language suitable for building concurrent, efficient, and reliable applications.
Golang’s focus on simplicity, performance, and concurrency empowers developers to write clean, scalable code and tackle modern software development challenges.
Benefits of Using Golang
Golang is resourceful and there’s no doubt about it. Thanks to its several useful features, it offers both developers and stakeholders pragmatic solutions and benefits for web app development. Let’s have a look at some of them.
– High Performance and Scalability: Go’s efficient runtime, lightweight concurrency model, and low memory footprint make it ideal for building high-performance and scalable web applications. It can easily handle a large number of concurrent requests, ensuring that your app is fit to meet increasing demands.
– Fast Development Cycle: Go’s simplicity and readability allow developers to write code quickly and efficiently. Its straightforward syntax and extensive standard library help pace up the development process and result in faster development cycles, reducing time to market for your web application.
– Cost-Effective Solution: Go’s efficient resource utilization means that businesses can achieve higher performance with fewer resources. This can result in cost savings in terms of infrastructure and hosting expenses, making it a feasible choice for startups and entrepreneurs who have budget constraints.
– Robust and Reliable: Go’s strong type system and static typing help catch errors early in the development phases, leading to code reliability and better coding quality. It also reduces the likelihood of runtime errors and enhances the overall stability of your web app.
– Concurrency for Enhanced User Experience: Go’s built-in concurrency model with goroutines and channels allows developers to build apps that can handle multiple requests simultaneously. This allows for highly responsive and interactive web applications, providing a seamless user experience even under heavy loads.
– Future-Proofing: Go has gained significant popularity despite being a relatively new language. Furthermore, it has strong backing from Google, where the language was designed.
This ensures its long-term support and continued development, making it a reliable choice for businesses looking to build sustainable and future-proof web applications.
Take Away
Golang is quite new in the web development industry (compared to other programming languages like C#, Java, and JavaScript). But Google’s technology comes with its own perks.
Golang houses a rich set of useful features that have already made it popular among developers. In Golang’s world, simplicity meets performance, and concurrency becomes effortless which allows programmers to build pragmatic, performant apps.
So businesses looking to get cost-effective and performance-proficient apps, better get started with Golang. Find the right experts and hire web developers who can help you acquire your full-fledged Golang app.
