Golang: Everything you need to know!

Hello everyone,

Here is everything you need to know about Golang.

So what is Go?

Go (often referred to as golang) is a programming language created at Google in 2009 by Robert Griesemer , Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.

Its popularity has skyrocketed recently. On the tiobe index it is on the 14th number putting behind languages like Swift, Objective Swift, PERL, VB etc. and 9th on the IEEE index.

Why Go?

• The go language is very concise, simple and safe.

• It’s compilation time is very fast.

• It supports the patterns which adapt to the surrounding environment similar to dynamic languages.

• It supports inbuilt concurrency such as lightweight processes channels and select statements.

• It supports the interfaces and the embedded types.

• It doesn’t require any external dependencies for the production of the statically linked native binaries.

How to use Go?

So there are numerous ways in which Go is used.

Network and Web Apps:-

Go specialises in Goroutines and channels which are a backbone for Networking. Hence, a number of projects are for networking, distributed functions, or services: APIs, websites, web servers,web apps etc.

Stand-alone command-line apps or scripts:-

Due to Go's consistent behaviour across platforms, it's easy to put out simple command-line apps that run most anywhere. Go programs can talk to external C libraries or make native system calls. Docker, for instance, works this way.

Who is using Go?

Many major organisations are shifting their codebase into Golang.

Docker - a set of tools for deploying linux containers

Openshift - a cloud computing platform as a service by Red Hat

Dropbox - migrated some of their critical components from Python to Go

Netflix - for two portions of their server architecture

Soundcloud - for "dozens of systems"

ThoughtWorks - some tools and applications around continuous delivery and instant messages (CoyIM)

Uber for handling high volumes of geofence-based queries.

Thanks.