Golang development

What is Go?

Go is a compiled multithreaded programming language. This means that an application written in Go looks like one file completely ready to run.

The Go language was created in 2009 by Google. Its full name is Golang – a derivative of “Google language”.

The developers of the language are Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. In the past, they worked at the legendary Bell Labs, which has released many technologies that have radically changed people’s lives: the transistor, laser, quartz clock, information theory, the UNIX operating system, and the C and C ++ programming languages.

The Go project aims to make software development at Google less awkward and slower than it was before. And at the same time, to make the process itself more productive and scalable.

Therefore, Go was developed taking into account a set of unsolved problems. It has a base of the best features taken from the Pascal, Modula and Oberon languages. They also relied on C and C ++, from which they took the speed of program execution, and Python, which was taken as an example of the simplicity of the code.

Initially, Go was used only inside Google, but then it emerged from the bowels of the corporation and went into the world.

Go was created as a programming language for “developing high-performance programs” as an alternative to C, C ++, and Java. Therefore, it got rid of many of the shortcomings of these programming languages, absorbing only the best.

Benefits of Go

Simple and straightforward syntax. Go’s syntax lacks inheritance, classes and objects, which greatly complicates the code and its subsequent changes. This makes the language extremely clear, concise and neat.

Simplified syntax not only makes programming easier, but allows you to quickly read someone else’s code – this is especially important in teamwork. Go reads like regular text in a textbook – from left to right. There is no need to introduce any standards, designations or comments – you will understand each other’s code anyway.

Many tools for developers. Go has built-in tools that greatly speed up development and help you solve a variety of tasks:

A utility for generating documentation. The GoDoc utility will find all comments and make a detailed manual for the program out of them.

Testing tools. Go has a variety of testing tools: the typecheck command will check the type match in the code, golint will provide recommendations based on the official documentation, gosimple will simplify complex syntax, and gas will find vulnerabilities.

A large number of libraries. There are libraries for almost any task. Much can be done using only the Go standard library. In addition to it, the language also supports many third-party libraries, the number of which is constantly growing. It also effectively interacts with C and C ++ libraries. They even note that Go libraries are, in fact, “wrappers” over C libraries.

High performance and security. Good performance is noticeable both when writing code and when executing it.In general, Go can improve performance by five to ten times without any optimizations.

Easy to learn for a beginner. Thanks to the simple syntax, basic things can be learned over the weekend. The official Go manual is only 50 pages long, easy to read, and contains many examples. You can learn a language only from this one specification.

Where is Go used?

Go is considered to be a universal language, but still it is more focused on cloud programming, operating system development, and web services.

Go is a simple language, but it allows you to do very complex things. You can quickly write a highly loaded, multithreaded, cross-platform application on it. The main scope of the language is networking software, utilities and backend.