Why Golang?A Developer’s Perspective
Go, also known as Golang, was created at Google in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was born out of a desire to create a new programming language that would combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically-typed language with the efficiency and safety of a compiled, statically-typed language.
Go (Golang) has been steadily gaining popularity and becoming more famous in recent years.Go has been widely adopted by major tech companies like Google, Uber, Dropbox, Netflix, SoundCloud, Docker, Kubernetes, CloudFlare, Twitch, Medium, Ethereum, HashiCorp etc.
Go is becoming more and more famous in recent years due to several key factors:
Simplicity and Ease of Learning: Go’s clean and minimalistic syntax, along with its focus on readability and simplicity, make it’s learning curve much easier, especially for developers familiar with C-like languages. This low barrier to entry has attracted many developers to the language.
Performance and Efficiency: Go’s compiled nature, efficient runtime, and lightweight concurrency model (goroutines and channels) make it a high-performance language suitable for building scalable and efficient systems. This performance advantage has made Go attractive for building various types of applications, from web services to distributed systems.
Built-in Concurrency Support: Go’s built-in support for concurrency through goroutines and channels has been a game-changer, especially in an era where multi-core processors are ubiquitous. This feature simplifies the development of concurrent and parallel programs, which is notoriously difficult in many other languages.
Cross-Platform Compatibility: Go’s ability to compile to native binaries for multiple platforms, including Linux, Windows, and macOS, without the need for virtual machines or recompilation, makes it highly portable and appealing for cross-platform development.
Strong Backing and Active Community: Go was created and is actively maintained by Google, which has invested significant resources into its development and promotion. Additionally, Go has a vibrant and growing community of developers contributing to its ecosystem, creating libraries, tools and sharing knowledge.
Cloud Computing and Containerization: Go’s capabilities align well with the needs of modern cloud computing and containerization technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes. Its efficiency, concurrency support, and cross-platform compatibility make it a popular choice for building cloud-native applications and microservices.
Adoption by Major Companies: As mentioned before many major companies, including Google, Docker, Uber, Dropbox, and others, have adopted Go for various projects and services, further contributing to its popularity and ecosystem growth.
Growing Ecosystem and Libraries: As the Go community continues to grow, so does the availability of high-quality libraries and tools for various domains, making Go an increasingly attractive choice for a wider range of projects and use cases.
While Go is not a silver bullet and may not be the best choice for every scenario, its unique combination of simplicity, performance, concurrency support, and cross-platform compatibility has made it a popular choice for building scalable and efficient systems, particularly in the areas of cloud computing, distributed systems, and network programming.
