Go Lang: A young programming language from Google

Multi-paradigm, Concurrent, Functional, Imperative, Object-Oriented

In this article, I have shared essential information about GO programming language. GO Lang is a young programming language introduced by Google.

Go (or Golang) is an open-source programming language designed to build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale.

Google uses Go specifically for its large networks of servers and Go also powers much of Google’s own cloud platform. Developers use Go in application development, web development, in operations and infrastructure teams, and much more. It is the language of Cloud Native infrastructure and software development.

As Go’s popularity and adoption continue to increase, we’ll see even greater usage and more creative implementations of the language!

Overview

Go is a programming language which is developed by Google with the vision of fast development and high performance. Go is a statically-typed language. Go has a similar syntax to C. Go provides type safety, garbage collection, dynamic-typing capability, many advanced built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps etc.

• Go is modern, fast and comes with a powerful standard library.
• Go has built-in concurrency.
• Go uses interfaces as the building blocks of code reusability.

Go is a general-purpose language designed with systems programming in mind. Programs are constructed using packages, for efficient management of dependencies. Go programming implementations use a traditional compile and link model to generate executable binaries.

Brief History

Go was designed at Google in 2007 to improve programming productivity for multicore, networked machines and large codebases. The designers at Google wanted to keep their useful characteristics:

• Static typing and run-time efficiency (like C++)
• Readability and usability (like Python or JavaScript)
• High-performance networking and multiprocessing

Go was publicly announced in November 2009, and version 1.0 was released in March 2012. Go is widely used in production at Google and in many other organizations and open-source projects.

In November 2016, the Go and Go Mono fonts were released by type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes specifically for use by the Go project. Go is a humanist sans-serif which resembles Lucida Grande and Go Mono is monospaced. Each of the fonts adheres to the WGL4 character set and were designed to be legible with a large x-height and distinct letterforms. Both Go and Go Mono adhere to the DIN 1450 standard by having a slashed zero, lowercase l with a tail, and an uppercase I with serifs.

In April 2018, the original logo was replaced with a stylized GO slanting right with trailing streamlines.

The Go 1.14 (Current Version) was released on Feb 2020.

Features

1. Concurrency

Go offers some great concurrency primitives and makes it extremely easy to implement a concurrent system. Go supports this at the language level and concurrency is a first-class citizen. The fundamental unit for this in Go is a goroutine.

2. Simplicity and Consistency

Go is a relatively simple language and was designed with a very minimalistic approach. It is easy to pick up and get started with. The standard library contains most things including a web server. Small features of the language help achieve this. For example- If the function name in a Go package starts with an uppercase letter, it is exported while all functions with lower case names are not. Go does not support generics, although it is strongly and statically typed. While this is debatable, it was done to keep the language simple and to avoid complexity. The standard library is exemplary and the packages are consistent.

3. Go is object-oriented

Coming from other languages, it may seem like Go is not object-oriented. It does not provide the class keyword and has no support for inheritance. This might seem bizarre. However, Go’s replacement for classes is structs. A struct may have any number of properties and methods defined on them.

4. Binaries

Go generates binaries for your applications with all the dependencies built-in. This removes the need for you to install runtimes that are necessary for running your application. This eases the task of deploying applications and providing necessary updates across thousands of installations. With its support for multiple OS and processor architectures, this is a big win for the language.

5. Language Design

The designers of the language made a conscious decision to keep the language simple and easy to understand. The entire specification is in a small number of pages and some interesting design decisions were made face-to-face Object-Oriented support in the language, that keeps the features limited. Towards this, the language is opinionated and recommends an idiomatic way of achieving things. It prefers Composition over Inheritance and its Type System is elegant and allows for behaviour to be added without tight coupling the components too much. In Go Language, “Do More with Less” is the mantra.

6. Powerful standard library

Go comes with a powerful standard library, distributed as packages. This library caters to most components, libraries that developers have come to expect from 3rd party packages when it comes to other languages. A look at the Packages available in the standard library is good enough indication of the power available in them.

7. Package Management

Go combines modern-day developer workflow of working with Open Source projects and includes that in the way it manages external packages. Support is provided directly in the tooling to get external packages and publish your own packages in a set of easy commands.

8. Static Typing

Go is a statically typed language and the compiler works hard to ensure that the code is not just able to compile correctly but other type conversions and compatibility are taken care of. This can avoid the problems that one faces in dynamically typed languages, where you discover the issues only when the code is executed.

9. Testing Support

Go Language brings Unit Testing right into the language itself. It provides a simple mechanism to write your unit tests in parallel with your code. The tooling also provides support to understand code coverage by your tests, benchmarking tests and writing example code that is used in generating your code documentation.

Application

1. Cloud services

As the creator of Go, Google is using this language to provide cloud infrastructure: it offers top performance and scalability to the Google Cloud Platform. But there are even more well-known cloud businesses out there using Go for the same reasons: Dropbox, Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker.

2. Media platforms

YouTube, SoundCloud, and Netflix chose to Go to fight with high loads on their sites. SoundCloud uses this language for deploying some internal services within their complex projects.

3. News outlets

Back in 2012, the BBC (yep, it was a surprise to us too) started using Go for backend development and some of the elements of their internal analytics services.

4. On-demand services

The taxi giant Uber was looking to improve map processing speeds as people loaded geofence lookups, sending literally thousands of queries per second. Go helped Uber significantly reduce the timing of providing services to users, which was much appreciated by users.

Aside from the services and products, Go provides good tooling for mobile app development. This is why we’ll soon see even more examples of Go in mobile apps and probably in some other industries as well.

Although Go is still a relatively young programming language, it has gained popularity among real business monsters like Google, Netflix, Uber, and others who use Go to scale their products and achieve high performance. Go is quickly changing for the best, providing more and more tools for mobile and web development and remarkably decreasing the time and costs of app development and support.