Most people know go for its concurrency, however, it is not the only programming language with this feature. It has common attributes with many programming languages especially with C. The strength of go is quite unique and subtle as well, it also has its own downside just like any programming language.
Why Programmers Love Golang
The first plus for go is the maintenance of the language by reliable experts from Google; it cannot run into oblivion or remain unmaintained for a long time. It has a vibrant community and contributors to the program; its heritage is something to envy, the creators are heavyweight programmers themselves.
Programmers and companies are also considering the cost of building software that will be compatible with different operating systems. Go portability between UNIX based systems makes it unique, the binary files comes bundled with a compiler to run on a different operating system. Though you need to specify the platform a build is for, the ease of creating a build for multiple platforms reduces the cost of creating a program from the ground up for different operating systems.
Programmers enjoy having some task taken off them, such as memory management or garbage collection. This is one of the chief causes of issues with some programming language, memory allocation, and deallocation are handled by golang.
Go syntax is simple to write and read, you can easily relate to this if you have written programs in C, C++, C#, or Java. Though Python is an exception, go syntax is readable and easy to understand. The lines of codes written are also less, this makes it easier for developers to write code with ease.
Some Strength of Golang
Compilation speed is one of the strengths of go, since it does not rely on an external compiler or preprocessor. It runs codes faster than most programs, though C is still faster. The compilers are bundled with go binaries, the downside to this is that it may make the binary size bulky.
Go is almost a multipurpose programming language, its core advantages are numerous, however, it can be used to build a web application, desktop application, web server, and other complex software programs. Some may argue about the strength of some programs in certain areas, just as go have somehow gained popularity in the DevOps community.
Golang Community – Gophers
The community backing go are quite creative, aside from the rich standard library that ships with go by default. Go has numerous third-party libraries that are well maintained, which also extends the powers of the go language. Also, you will find frameworks based on golang for rest API development and web frameworks. They all have their unique strengths and they effectively extend the power of the go language.
One feature most people do not talk about is the Unicode support go has; it recognizes different human languages, symbols, and characters. You can write “hello go” in Mandarin or Arabic.
More Advantages of Golang
You can share your binary files with another programmer or user without the need to worry about the dependency file or library used, also versioning is not a problem with go binary. A plus for go is the relative stability of previous codes versions when a new version is out. Programmers do not experience breaking changes with major go updates, maintainers of the language have promised to keep it that way. Changes will always happen, but it will likely not cause code to crash or break due to a new version release.
Concurrency is not parallelism, with go concurrency is what make it a very fast and solid program. Go has the ability to implement codes concurrently, in essence, concurrency is the composition of independently executing processes. It can easily deal with a lot of things at once, this is very useful in modern programming. It saves cost and resources.
Go is a beautiful language, it is suitable for newbies and experienced programmers. It is easier for a newbie to enjoy the program than experienced programmers who have written programs in other backend programming language. While the experienced programmer can easily learn the golang faster and enjoy some of its flexibility.
