Golang: The Most Promising Language Out There

Breakthroughs and innovations are common in the world of programming languages. In order to meet the ever-changing business needs, developers always try to find a general purpose programming language that is more project-friendly, easy to use, and packages the most quirks and features. As a relatively new programming language, Go or Golang can efficiently satisfy the needs of the present-day programmers with a full pack of solutions. Like C and C++, it is a blazing fast statically typed, compiled language. At the same time, it challenges most interpreted and loosely typed languages such as Python, PHP, and JavaScript in programmer-friendliness and simplicity.

Due to its unique ability to address the modern programming issues, Golang is often considered as the most promising programming language available today. For developing large, complex software, Golang can be an out-performer. It is a language engineered for distributed systems, multicore processors, computation clusters and cloud native services that make up the IT infrastructure of present times.

Origin and History of Golang

Golang is a general-purpose programming language designed at Google. It specifically suits the trend of plural core systems rather than faster clock speeds of modern computers. For most developers, Golang emerged as an alternative to C++, considering the requirements of Google for its distributed systems and network servers. The language was created to solve problems like lack of pace and intricacies related to programming for scalable and large software systems. Only in recent years Golang has started to gain popularity, though it was announced back in 2009, and its first version was released in 2012.

At that time, multithreading and its related issues were not considered by most available programming languages, especially when most common architectures such as micro-services and event-driven are considered multithreaded by nature. However, many applications cannot be designed this way and given the clear trend of multi-core CPUs over faster clock speeds of the past decade, it became evident that the applications of the future are multithreaded. Therefore, three engineers at Google, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer came forward and created the Go programming language. 

While creating the language, these Google engineers ensured that Go possesses very neat and clean syntax. It was in their mind that the code needs to be simple to understand for other developers. At the same time, in order to make sure that the code is easy to modify and easily maintainable, it was also ensured one segment of code does not have any major side effect on other segments of the codebase. Go developers had these things in mind, as thousands of developers of the company were working on a large code-base at the same time. These are some of the common issues unrightfully claimed to be totally solved by Decoupling, SOLID, DDD and many other design patterns.

Major Solutions Developed using Golang

Here are some of my favorite open source software that was built using Golang:

• Docker - a containerization platform that packages your application and all its dependencies together in the form of a virtual container.
• Kubernetes - a container-orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.
• MinIO - a high performance and distributed object storage system, AWS S3 compatible, designed for cloud native workloads like AI.

And here is an endless list of great open source software built using Golang. It’s also inevitable that many of the recent applications offered by Google are developed with Golang. 

Why Golang is Unique?

Golang is Efficient, Fast, and Simple

Golang is a robust system-level language that offers the following benefits:

• Fast compilation and execution of programs;
• A boost to documentation and code readability;
• Offering consistency thoroughly;
• Making versioning of the program easy; and
• Allowing easier maintenance of dependencies.

In fact, compiled languages like C++ can boost the speed of program execution and performance by removing the steps used for interpreting languages into binaries. However, a lot of time and complexities are involved in extracting and allocating variables in C++ language. On the other hand, though programming languages like Java or JVM do not have this type of problem, however, these are slow due to the time needed for compiling byte-code into binaries. By bringing the best of both worlds, Golang works as an ideal solution that works within any hardware system. Like C++, it is a compiled language that is fast, and simultaneously, like Java, it uses object removal and garbage collection, making it highly efficient.

What makes Go very different from other languages is that it has avoided many features of the modern object-oriented programming languages, like the following:

• Go does not support inheritance.
• It is classless, instead it has structs.  
• It has no annotations.
• It has no constructors.
• It has no generics and exceptions.

Another major benefit of using Go is its unmatched simplicity and straightforward approach. Some of the simplistic features of it include the following:

• Golang does not possess any separate runtime library and removes all the issues regarding making mistakes on versions mismatch or dependencies by producing a single executable code that can be used by simply copying.
• Designers of Golang made things simple by deciding to go without templates or generics that sometimes add difficulties in understanding and obscurity of various types.
• Go has no dynamic libraries which simplifies it even more.

Getting Started with Go

Furthermore, Go has a relatively low learning curve, where it is not at all difficult to learn all of its quirks and features. With basic programming knowledge, you can do it in few hours at a single sitting. Go’s clear and easy documentation is widely acclaimed. You can easily make your team confident with this language. The environment is not difficult to set up, and you will have to invest a very small amount before you can complete your first production code with Golang.

The Go Programming Language Blog is another useful resource for the programmers. In addition, using a static code analysing tool called GoDoc, it is possible to create nice documentation pages directly from the code. For annotating constructions in your code, it only uses English, and no other extra language, unlike PHPDoc or JavaDoc. 

By offering in-built testing and profiling tools, Go helps testing applications efficiently and easily. It makes minimum assumptions and provides the simplest API possible. You can also use these tools to get examples of executable code that you will find as immensely helpful. Different advanced features, like running parallel tests, skipping them, etc. are also supported by these tools.

Golang works best for projects involving Cloud services, distributed networks, and other complex back-end technologies. I have particularly tried it on AWS Lambda functions and it outperformed every other language available. You can choose this language if your company faces common issues related to scalability, like costly updates, uncontrolled dependencies, messy documentation, slow builds, and difficulty in managing automation.

How Golang Supports Multi-Threading

Golang supports multi-threading or executing two or more parts of a program concurrently for ensuring maximum CPU utilization. It can handle a good number of tasks at a time as it works with what is known as goroutines. This ensures better performance of sophisticated systems where cores continue to grow exponentially. Furthermore, Golang helps avoid race conditions that may happen when multiple concurrent tasks finish in an unpredicted order, resulting in different kinds of bugs that are difficult to fix. 

Some other benefits of goroutines include the following:

• More than threads, goroutines have faster startup time.
• Goroutines is elastic where it will use more memory only when required, as these have growable segmented stacks.
• For secure communication, goroutines use their built-in primitives.
• Using goroutines, it is possible to avoid dependence on mutex locking while sharing data structures.
• Goroutines are easy-to-control, as two or more of these can be coordinated and synchronized at the same time.

The main reason multi-threading gained particular focus by the creators of Go was because it was conceived at a time when using multi-core processors became popular around the world.

Rapid Growth of Golang Community

The popularity of Golang is growing at an increasing rate, as current programmers are constantly looking to develop serverless and cloud-native applications. The execution cost and efficiency are gradually becoming essential components of cloud infrastructure, making Go a preferred choice for the programmers of current times. 

Around the world, at least one million developers are currently using Go, as found by Google’s Russ Cox. Its use is constantly rising. According to the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 8.2% of developers use Golang at present, which was 7.1% in  2017. 

Problems of Golang

Go is an easy language to choose, but it is also one of its biggest problems due to the lack of versatility. Languages like Haskell and Kotlin may be difficult to learn, but these have managed to attract fans by offering a wealth of smart abstractions, which have allowed them to achieve complex and clever results. Go’s variety also minimizes due to a lack of high-level functionality. Furthermore, as a comparatively new language, it sometimes becomes difficult for Go to compete with its older siblings. In terms of library support and maturity, Go will take time to match its competitors like Java and C++.

Conclusion

Go took the entire programming world by surprise ever since it came out. Considering the large scalable enterprise software systems and performance-savvy multi-core hardware systems, Go offers tremendous benefits. It gives fun to code like Python and Ruby, efficient concurrency handling like Java, and high performance like C and C++. If you want to solve problems related to complex software infrastructure environments or build cloud native applications, you can comfortably choose Go. It is expected that the use of this programming language and its followers will continue to increase around the world in the near future.