Go is a procedural-oriented programming language. The language was developed in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson at Google, but launched in 2009 as an open source programming language. Programs are built using packages, for efficient dependency management. The Golang language also supports the same environment adoption pattern as dynamic languages. For example, type inference (y := 0 is a valid declaration of a variable y of type int).
Golang is designed to be simple, efficient, and easy to learn, making it a popular choice for building scalable network services, web applications, and command line tools.
Go is known for its concurrency support, i.e. the ability to run multiple tasks at the same time. Concurrency is achieved in Go through the use of Goroutines and Channels, allowing you to write code that can run multiple operations at the same time. This makes Go ideal for building high-performance and scalable network services, as well as for solving complex computational problems.
Another important feature of Go is garbage collection, which automatically manages memory for you. This eliminates the need for manual memory management, reducing the possibility of memory leaks and other errors that can arise from manual memory management. Go is often used to build large-scale distributed systems and high-performance applications.
Key features of Golang
- Simplicity: Go is designed to be easy to learn and use. Its syntax is simple and easy to understand, making it suitable for both beginners and experienced programmers.
- Simultaneously: Go has built-in concurrency support, allowing developers to write efficient and scalable code for multicore and distributed systems.
- Garbage collection: Go has automatic memory management, which saves developers from having to worry about memory allocation and deallocation.
- Fast compilation time: Go has a fast compiler, making it easy to iterate quickly during development.
- Cross-platform support: Go can be compiled to run on a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Strong type: Go is a statically typed language, which helps detect errors at compile time instead of at run time.
- Go has a large and growing community of developersis used by many famous companies, including Google, Uber, and Dropbox.
For example, a program “Hello World!” Simple in Go
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}
Result:
Hello, World!
Get started with Go programming
There are many IDEs online like The Go Playground, repl.it etc that can be used to run Go programs without installation.
To install Go on your own PC or Laptop, we need the following two software: Text Editor and Compiler
Text editor: Text editor provides you with a platform for writing source code. The following is a list of text editors that can run Golang:
- Windows notepad
- OS Edit command
- Brief
- Epsilon
- vm or vi
- Emacs
- VS Code
Find the Go compiler: The Go distribution comes as installable binaries for FreeBSD (version 8 or later), Linux, Mac OS 32-bit (386) and 64-bit (amd64) x86 processing.
Pros and cons of Golang
Advantages of Go programming language
- Flexible – Short, simple and easy to read.
- Concurrency – Allows multiple processes to run simultaneously and efficiently.
- Fast results – Compilation times are very fast.
- Library – Provides a rich standard library.
- Garbage Collection – This is the main feature of Go. Go excels at providing a lot of control over memory allocation and has significantly reduced latency in the most recent versions of its garbage collector.
- Validate interface and embed style.
- Performance: Go is designed to run fast and efficiently, with a focus on performance and low memory usage. This makes Go well suited for building high-performance network services as well as solving complex computational problems.
- Simplicity: Go has a simple syntax and simple type system, making it easy to learn and use, even for those with no previous programming experience.
Disadvantages of Go programming language
- It has no support for generic types, even if there is much discussion about it.
- The packages distributed with this programming language are quite useful, but Go is not object-oriented in the conventional sense.
- Some libraries, especially UI toolkits, are missing.
- Limited object-oriented features.
- The standard library is not complete.
Some popular applications are developed using Go Language
- Docker: a toolkit for deploying Linux containers
- Openshift: a cloud computing platform as a service from Red Hat.
- Kubernetes: The future of seamless deployment automation
- Dropbox: migrated some of their key components from Python to Go.
- Netflix: for two parts of their server architecture.
- InfluxDB: is an open source time series database developed by InfluxData.
- Golang: The language itself is written in Go.