Go is a procedural programming language. It 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 assembled by using packages, for efficient management of dependencies. This language also supports environment adopting patterns alike to dynamic languages. For eg., type inference (y := 0 is a valid declaration of a variable y of type float).
Why to Choose?
1. Open-Source
The foremost characteristic of Golang programming language is that it is open-source. That means, anyone can download and experiment with the code to bring better codes into picture and fix related bugs.
2. Static Typing
Go is a statically typed programming language and works with a mechanism that makes it possible to compile code accurately while taking care of type conversions and compatibility level. This gives developers freedom from challenges associated with dynamically typed languages.
3. Concurrency Support
One of the prime characteristics of go programming language is its concurrency support.
Golang, unlike other programming languages, offers easier and trackable concurrency options. This makes it easier for app developers to complete requests at a faster pace, free up allocated resources and network earlier, and much more.
4. Powerful Standard Library and Tool Set
This programming language also comes loaded with a robust standard library. This libraries offer ample components that gives developers an escape from turning towards third party packages anymore.
Also, it offers a wider range of tools that makes development process efficient. This includes:
Gofmt: It automatically formats your Go code, which eventually brings a major impact on readability.
Gorun: This tool is used to add a ‘bang line’ in the source code to run it, or run a similar sode code file explicitly. It is often used by Go developers when experimenting with codes written in Python.
Goget: The Goget tool downloads libraries from GitHub and save it to your GoPath so that you can easily import the libraries in your app project.
Godoc: The tool parses Go source code, including comments and creates a documentation in HTML or plain text format. The documentation made is tightly coupled with codes it documents and can be easily navigated with one click.
5. Testing Capabilities
Go language also offers an opportunity to write unit tests along with writing the app codes. Besides, it avails support to understand code coverage, benchmark tests, and write example codes to create your own code documentation.
6. Garbage Collection
The programming language also offers exceptional power of garbage collection. Meaning, developers need not worry about freeing up pointers or the situation associated with dangling pointer. Because of these characteristics, the language has gained attention of various popular brands.
7. Language Design
The designers of the language made a conscious purposeful to keep the language simple and easy to understand. The entire detailing is in a few pages and some interesting design decisions were made through Object-Oriented support in the language.Towards this, the language is opinionated and recommends an idiomatic way of achieving things. It prefers Composition over Inheritance. In Go Language, “Do More with Less” is the mantra.
8. Package Management
Go merges modern day developer workflow of working with Open Source projects and includes that in the way it manages external packages. Support is provided directly in the tooling to get external packages and publish your own packages in a set of easy commands.
9. Platform Independent
Go language is just like Java language as it support platform independency. Due to its modular design and modularity i.e., the code is compiled and is converted into binary form which is as small as possible and hence, it requires no dependency. Its code can be compiled in any platform or any server and application you work on.
Advantages of Golang:
1. Ease of Use
One of the biggest benefits of Golang language is that its syntax is similar to that of C and C++. There are not many complex functions to learn and implement. Besides, the documentation is simple and can be used quickly.
2. Cross-Platform Development Opportunities
Another advantage of going with this language is that multiple types of applications can be developed in Go. This includes software and mobility solutions for Windows, Unix, Linux, BSD versions, and mobile platforms.
3. Faster Compilation and Execution
In Golang development environment, there is no Virtual Machine. The code is directly compiled to machine code, which makes the compilation process faster and more effective.
Besides, the compiler produces only one executable file after compilation. This file does not suffer from any kind of dependency and can be uploaded and run anywhere. This makes the code execution process faster.
4. Scalable
Another feature that makes Golang outshine other programming languages is that it is highly scalable in nature. It enables top android mobile app developers to handle multiple tasks at the same time, especially channels and goroutines.
5. Time Saving
With features like automatic declaration of variables, latency free garbage collection, and faster compile time, it saves consideration development time; giving developers enough time to be productive.
Disadvantages of Golang:
1. Still Developing
Though the popularity graph of Go programming language is growing and it holds a promising future in the market, it is still in its nascent stage. This is making it tough for the language to beat the competition with popular names like Java.
2. Too Simple
Programming languages like Swift and Haskell are difficult to learn. But, at the same time, they offer a myriad of opportunities to perform abstractions and other complex processes. Something that is not possible in the case of Golang because of its ultra-simple design.
3. Absence of GUI Library
Another con of go programming language is that it does not offer native support for GUI libraries. This implies app development companies have to connect a library to their application manually, rather than using native solutions like that in the case of Java or Python.
4. No Specific Niche
Designed by Google with the motive to deliver endless support and solutions, the language has characteristics that goes well with all. However, the language has still not found a single niche to conquer.
While it is facing competition from JavaScript in frontend development world, it is lagging behind Python in the world of data visualization and analysis. Because of this, many developers are still hesitating from investing in this language for a particular purpose.
5. Poor Error Handling
In the case of Go language, a function is required to return error if any error is expected. Developers have to write a huge number of ‘if’ blocks to perform error handling process efficiently and effectively. Something that is one of the golang coding challenges when they have lost track to the error that can further result in missing out of some imperative error handling logic.
6. Lack of Frameworks
Last but not least, Go lags behind programming languages like Python, PHP and Ruby on Rails in terms of number of frameworks to go with.
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