Why you should learn Golang

Why you should learn Golang

The simple reason is It's clean and easy. Go is designed to be simple, built to purpose, and intuitive to run. Essentially, Go is really great for beginners and it's a language where everything is done for a practical reason. Golang’s path to data abstraction and object-oriented development is remarkably flexible. Though Go has already gained the popularity of notable business giants such as Google, Netflix, Uber, and many companies, taking the benefits of Go to scale their products and achieve high performance.

In the recent StackOverflow 2020 survey results, it is found that Go is one of the most loved and wanted programming languages among developers. Let's know why developers love and you should learn.

Golang was conceptualized at Google, it got its name right from Google. The language was conceptualized by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Besides the cute mascot, Go brings a whole set of benefits.

  • Opensource: Nature itself can raise trust in the program. It is considered to be trustworthy for being open and clear to other people. That’s why there is a large community. Some of the most popular infrastructure tools today are written in Go such as Kubernetes, Docker, and Prometheus. It's rapidly being adopted with cloud-native tools and technologies.

  • Simplicity: It's at the heart of golang. Golang has indisputable architectural advantages over its predecessors. Converting legacy code to Go is pretty straightforward and fairly simple. Go itself teaches a lot of good practices like Composition over Inheritance, explicit and immediate error handling, and a bunch of others. Go is pretty strict with its compiler rules, which (when combined with go fmt/go vet) will teach you good habits.

  • Performance: Its speed, simplicity, and reliability make it the perfect choice for all kinds of developers. Go programs with unused package imports do not compile. This improves code clarity and long-term performance. Go is also able to handle high volumes of requests, as QPS (queries per second) rate is a lot better. Go’s concurrency mechanism is a great fit for multicore and networked machines and allows Go to be the first choice for web-based backend services It's a perfect language for applications that require heavy concurrent and/or parallel processing, microservices, data-intensive applications.

  • Concurrency: While concurrent programming is never easy, Go makes it easier than in other languages. It is almost trivial to create a lightweight thread, called a “goroutine”, and communicate with it via a “channel. It uses goroutines, which consume as low as 2 KB memory, to perform several tasks at the same time. It's the growable segment stacks in goroutines only use more memory when needed.

  • Memory management: Go is garbage collected, protecting against memory leaks, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-Style concurrency. It provides automatic memory management. There are only 25 keywords and there is no need to manage memory with threads. It has a real-time Garbage Collector (GC) for automatic memory management. This concurrent GC makes allocation and removal of objects without any pause and hence, boosts the efficiency of applications. Go relies on a concurrency model called CSP ( Communicating Sequential Processes). Instead of locking variables to share a memory, it allows you to communicate the value stored in your variable from one thread to another. Go also contains a built-in Race detector to stop race conditions often linked to creating multi-threaded applications.

  • Automatic documentation & static code analysis GoDoc automatically generates documentation from the Go source code. With GoDoc, you get structured and formatted technical documentation that includes cool features such as cross-referencing, code examples, and even links to the version control repository. It's easily documentable using docstrings so learning these habits will give you immediate tangible benefits. Talking about static code analysis, GoMetaLinter is a meta-tool that helps developers analyze their code quickly and in detail with the added function of creating LR parsers for better analysis. It saves a lot of time and obviously productivity.

There are lots of awesome libraries and tools solving huge problems in the developer community and business model. Go enhances the availability and reliability of services. Its native concurrency and memory-safe garbage collection make it an ideal choice for widespread cloud deployments. Being general programming, you can tackle a wide spectrum of problems.

Golang is becoming more and more popular among developers, so take your chance and start learning it today.