The Go programming language is currently one of the fastest growing languages in the software industry. With great speed, simplicity, and reliability, it has become the perfect choice for seemingly every developer out there.
Personally, after spending years in the software industry and using various programming languages, I found that Go is the only programming language where I can feel the power erupting from my fingers.
Go, or “golang” as it’s sometimes called, is a compiled programming language created in 2009 by Google. It is similar to C, but with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing and CSP-style concurrency. And it’s about to take over the world of programming.
Still not convinced it’s worth it to hop on the Go bandwagon?
Here are 6 reasons why you should use Go in your next project.
- It’s simple to use
If you’re used to other development languages, it might seem complicated at first, but don’t worry. You can learn the language in a few days and start working on serious projects right away. This might be the biggest upside of Go since it makes it easy and fast to introduce other programmers to your projects, even if they aren’t familiar with Go.
- It’s powerful and fast!
If you’re coming from a language like Python, you’ll feel the speed on your first go. Other languages such as Java are compiled into bytecode, which is executed by the virtual machine. Go is a compiled language, which means that the code you write is translated instantly into a format that the processor understands. This results in a program that runs much faster and more efficiently.
- It’s designed to support concurrency.
Achieving concurrency in any language usually comes with a lot of pain and bugs. However, in Go you can easily run a function asynchronously just by adding the word “go” before the function call. That creates what’s called a “goroutine,” and you can have tons of them without being worried about managing them. Each goroutine only takes up 2 kB of memory, which allows you to run multiple concurrent processes. It also requires less RAM than Java threads for example, which lowers the risk of crashing due to lack of memory.
- Batteries included!
Do you want to write a web server that can handle 100 000 requests? With Go, you can do this easily with Go’s built-in HTTP library. And you don’t need any other web servers in front of it. It’s powerful enough to handle all kinds of jobs. There’s also a lot of other built-in libraries like net, database/sql, test, crypto, and more.
- It has its own formatting tool
Code style is a big discussion in the developer world and every single developer has their own way of code formatting. Go fixed this problem by providing a built-in formatting tool which lets you simply format your code following Go standards using the go fmt command.
- Race condition detection.
When we’re using multi-threaded software, race conditions can be a big issue. Sometimes, competing processes can come to unexpected conflict, and it’s difficult to find and debug this kind of problem. Thankfully, Go provides a command that will check your code to find this kind of issue. Simply run go test -race packageName and it shows you potential places inside your code that may have a race condition problem.
Conclusion Over the past 10 years, Go has quickly gained the popularity of great companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix and Uber, who use Go to scale their products and achieve high performance.
So not only will you decrease your time and cost of your app development by using Go. You will also make sure your competitors don’t leave you in the dust. With the steadily growing popularity of Go in the programming world, the question shouldn’t be why you should use Go, it should be “When do you start?”