Article by: Codenga 06.07.2022

Go language - why it’s worth learning

Go (or Golang) may not be the most popular programming language around. But it has distinct features that make it really shine in some applications. And its popularity has been growing steadily over the last few years.

Let’s begin with an indispensable Stack Overflow survey:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies

We can clearly see that about 10% of respondents use Go on a daily basis. You can say, it is not so much - there are more popular languages. What really matters is the growth of popularity. The growth of the adoption of the Go language. And that’s where Golang starts to shine.

Language of the XXI Century

Golang is a breath of fresh air in the world of programming. It is somehow bases on a traditional language of C family (eg. C++, Java, C#). On the other hand it offers some significant improvements over them.

Go has similar use cases as the languages mentioned above. It's mainly used to write APIs, and all kinds of back-end apps. That’s why Go can be a great, modern replacement for those languages.

Go gives you better performance, stability and predictability. We can say that Go removes significant drawbacks of his predecessors, replacing them with modern solutions. It is simply the programming language of the XXI Century. It lets you achieve the same things but with greatly reduced workload.

Speed

Go is a compiled language and that alone puts its above interpreted languages in the speed department. Surely, one could say the same thing about other compiled languages like Java and C#. But the mere fact that Go is a modern language, built with performance in mind, makes it more performant than mentioned above competitors.

Don’t forget that Golang has been created by Google to serve their needs. This the language you would use to write highly performant web apps serving a high number of requests per second.

Concurrency

The topic of performance is quite closely related to concurrency - an ability to perform many calculations simultaneously. The concept of concurrency is not new. In some degree it was present in Java, C# or C++. But that concurrency often was just an addition. It felt like it was a little forced. Go is different because it has concurencry written in his DNA. One should not forget that concurrent programming is crucial when it comes to writing highly performant server side software./p>

Simple Syntax

At the beginning of the article we said that the popularity of Go is growing. And with that comes also growth of the entire ecosystem of the language - libraries, tools, documentation and IDEs.

Go has a whole lot of packages supporting creating applications. We are talking about packages providing database support, creating API’s, creating terminal apps e.t.c. At the same time Go also has very extensive standard library which contains a lot of ready to use functions

Rich and very extensive ecosystem

At the beginning of the article we said that the popularity of Go is growing. And with that comes also growth of the entire ecosystem of the language - libraries, tools, documentation and IDEs.

Is go worth learning?

Go is utilized by Google in many critical parts of its vast IT infrastructure. That fact alone gives us confidence that Go won’t disappear for the foreseeable future. We can be sure that Go will be well supported for many years.

Where is Golang being used?

Speaking of use cases of the language - let’s take a look at some examples.

Dropbox uses Go in the server/backend part of its service.
Google uses capabilities of the language in some projects e.g. Firebase and Google search engine.
Microsoft uses go in their server infrastructure

One could find many more use cases of this great language. As you can see Go plays a pretty big role in some of the largest IT companies.