Quick Summary:

Golang, or the Go language, has been in talks since it was introduced within the market. However, this widespread popularity within the market has not been able to decipher the hesitation of business owners about using it. Thus, arising the ever-dangling question, ‘Why use Golang?’

To answer this uncertainty among business owners few factors like advantages, drawbacks, use cases, etc., can play a crucial role. So, this blog post aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the Golang programming language, including its uses, advantages, and established standards; it also guides you on how to start with Golang for your software application development.

Table of Contents

The History of Golang and Statistics

Golang was initially introduced in 2009, whereby the experienced programmers at Google, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer, developed the Go language intending to create a simple language. Recently after its launch date, Golang gained the title of the language of the year by the TIOBE programming community index in the same year, and it has since gained higher rankings every year. In 2010, it surpassed the established programming language Pascal and was ranked 13th.

However, in 2013, it dropped off the list, falling below the 50th position. Nevertheless, Go regained recognition as the language of the year in 2016, and in the subsequent years of 2017 and 2018, it climbed to the 10th and 12th positions, respectively, as more developers adopted it. As of March 2024, Go remains one of the top 10 programming languages. Its popularity among developers can be attributed to its ability to combine essential features, such as built-in concurrency, garbage collection, static typing, and robust performance.

According to GitHub statistics, the Go community has grown 147% since 2020. It is designed for complex business projects and has been the preferred choice for many of the world’s strongest global brands, a significant answer to Why use Golang?

Advantages of Golang for Your Business

Golang is a statically typed programming language with out-of-the-box features such as garbage collection, concurrency, and simple syntax that make it easy to learn and use. Given below are the few Golang advantages that justify why Golang is designed to be fast, efficient, and well-suited for building networked and distributed systems:

Simplicity and Ease of Use

Golang’s simple and clean syntax makes learning and reading easy, contributing to the simpler Golang web development. It is easier to understand and maintain than other languages, even for inexperienced or new developers, thus, enabling you to get resources within the budget. Also, it has a standard library that presents many inbuilt functions and tools, making it easy to write efficient and scalable codes.

Concurrency and Performance

Golang was precisely designed with concurrency, making it ideal for applications requiring handling multiple tasks simultaneously. The Go language has lightweight goroutines and channels, allowing efficient communication and coordination between program segments, presenting faster and more efficient performance. Golang’s garbage collector is equally capable of freeing up memory quickly and efficiently.

Static Typing and Safety

Golang offers a static typing system that ensures the variables are correctly typed at the compile time, reducing the probability of errors. Also, it has an inbuilt error-handling mechanism that helps prevent crashes or any kind of unexpected behaviors. Further, Golang is highly secure and safe; thus, it is extensively used in applications that require a high level of security, such as healthcare, government, and finance.

Garbage Collection and Memory Management

Amongst the essential benefits of Golang, automatic garbage collection is one of the most critical Golang benefits that free the developers from manually managing the memory, thereby reducing the probability of memory leaks or similar other memory-related issues. And having an effective memory management system enables you to get scalable applications for your business.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

Golang allows compiling for different operating systems and architectures, making it versatile and portable. It also allows your developers to create applications that can run on several platforms and devices, reducing the need for multiple versions of a single application, again keeping your budgets in check.

Growing Ecosystem and Community

Golang possesses an extensive ecosystem and active community that help develop new tools, libraries, and frameworks, making it simpler to develop in Golang. It also has many open-source projects making it easier for developers to find solutions to common issues.

When to use Golang?

Golang, or Go programming language, is an excellent and intuitive choice for businesses with various use cases, making it ideal for moving forward. Here are some points mentioning What is Golang used for or the types of applications where Golang programming language is your next choice for your web application development:

Web Development and Server-Side Programming

Golang possesses extensive concurrency features and effective memory management. Golang has brought out several renowned frameworks, such as Gin and Echo, allowing the development of scalable and performant web applications.

System Programming and Networking

When building low-level programs that need high performance and efficient use of resources, Golang’s built-in network libraries make it easy to create network applications and services. Several network-heavy, such as Proxies, Load Balancers, VPNs, etc., are all built in Golang.

Machine Learning and Data Analysis

The performance of Golang and its efficiency make it an ideal choice for machine learning and data analysis applications needing a large amount of data processing. Often, Golang is used in conjunction with various other technologies, such as TensorFlow, for building highly effective and scalable machine learning applications.

Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems

Golang is effectively used for creating cloud-based applications and distributed systems. The concurrency features and cross-platform compatibility make it ideal for building scalable, fault-tolerant systems. Kubernetes, a renowned container orchestration system, is built using Golang.

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When not to use Golang?

Golang is designed with the sole intent of keeping it more intuitive and user-friendly; however, these characteristics, along with a few other factors, sometimes turn out to be a setback or a contradiction to What is Golang good for, thereby leading to certain circumstances where Golang is not the most viable choice. A few of them are given below:

GUI Applications

Golang has no GUI or Graphic User Interface toolkit in standard libraries like Java or C#. Therefore, product owners must use third-party libraries to build UIs, making your application more complex. So, when aiming for desktop applications with a GUI, you can consider Java or C#, which have their in-built GUI toolkit.

Legacy Systems

Golang is still a relatively new language and is not much viable for maintaining or extending the legacy systems written in other languages. Rewriting an entire system in Golang is a time taking and expensive and, thus, is not worth the effort if the existing system is effectively working. Therefore, it is better to stick with the language used for the legacy systems written or consider a better and more compatible language like Java or Python.

Large Enterprise Applications

Golang is a scalable language regarding pervasive enterprise-level applications needing extensive features and integrations. And as discussed, Golang is a young language with a comparatively smaller ecosystem than languages like Java and Python, which implies that fewer libraries and tools are available within the market to handle complex needs and requirements such as high availability, distributed system, and other enterprise system integration.

Data Analysis and Scientific Computing

Golang possesses a few libraries for data analysis and scientific computing. Still, there may not be better choices for these applications as other tech stacks like Python and R possess more extensive and specialized libraries and frameworks for data analysis and scientific computing, making it the reason data scientists and researchers prefer them. Though Golang offers functionality for these applications, it may not be that convenient compared to Python and R.

Comparing Golang with Other Programming Languages

All programming languages, including Golang, possess specific characteristics that make one different or efficient from others. Below is a comparison of Golang with a few other programming languages to help you decide Why Choose Golang for your next web application development project.

Java

When comparing Golang with Java, Golang is initially simpler and faster, making it a good choice for small to medium-sized applications. However, Java, on the other hand, is more mature along with a larger ecosystem, thus, making it a more feasible option for developing enterprise-level applications.

Python

When answering, Golang vs Python? Then, Golang takes the lead as it is faster than Java and is also more efficient, thus, making it a better choice for applications needing high performance and scalability. In contrast, Python is easier to learn and has a broader range of libraries and frameworks, thus, enabling better data analysis and scientific computing.

C++

Comparing Golang and C++, the Go language is easier to learn and use, having a simple syntax, memory management, and system. Also, it is more secure with built-in error handling and garbage collection. C++, on the other hand, is faster and more efficient, making it a better option for low-level systems programming.

Rust

The reason to choose Golang over Rust is that Golang offers simplicity and user-friendliness for its developers, delivering a simpler programming experience to the product owners. This uniformity and simplicity-centric approach of Golang enhances team efficiency, making it a developer-favored language, whereas Rust presents excellent control over threads and their behavior within the system; however, its complexity and steep learning curve make it less popular among developers.

Node.js

Compared to Node.js, Golang is lightweight and possesses a performance characteristic similar to that of C/C++; However, both Golang and Node show almost identical results considering real-life performance, database interactions, or net network communication, but Golang presents a consistent performance under all aspects whereas, for Node.js, it either shows an exceptional performance of terrible depending on the application type.

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Go Best Practices

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Golang in IoT

Golang for IoT platform is a great combination that can easily connect millions of IoT devices and create real-time reports by applying various technologies along with Golang. Combining Golang in IoT will increase the scalability, concurrency, device useability, and support feature-rich packages that the Go package manager can import.

Golang in BlockChain

Building a blockchain in Golang increases speed and efficiency as it is much more productive than Python and JavaScript. It is easy to find libraries and packages to make the technology like Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Golang for AI Applications

Using the Go language for building AI applications is excellent as it improves user experience, financial planning, and customer interaction. These applications use machine learning and self-correction by which they can mimic human knowledge. Golang-based AI applications require natural language processing, extraction, and visualization libraries.

Golang For Machine Learning

Business owners and developers have multiple language options to choose from for the development of Machine Learning Platforms. However, Golang is among the most preferred programming languages, offering high performance, speed, and high-tech computation calculations. It also provides libraries that best suit Machine Learning solutions. Goga, goml, and GoMind are a few libraries Golang offers for Machine Learning.

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Golang Community and Networking Resources

Golang first appeared on November 10, 2009, which means it has been around 13 Years since people have experienced the vast potential of the Go language. In these years, Golang has grown extensively in terms of improving and the community supporting Golang. As per the latest data, it has 111k Stars and 16.4k Forks on GitHub.

The other websites, such as Reddit, StackOverflow, and Golang Bridge, all present forums that enable asking questions and getting help from experienced developers. Also, the meetups and conferences are great opportunities to network with other Golang developers and learn about the latest trends and best practices.

9 Big Companies Using Golang for Business

We saw why Golang is the most trusted modern programming language for entrepreneurs and developers. To ensure your faith in Google’s Golang language, many big brand names have implemented their websites using the Go programming language and developed the best-in-class Golang applications. This is also a contributing factor in bringing you the answer to Why use Golang.

Google

Google is the creator of Golang, and they primarily launched it for their internal projects and for developers’ ease. The Googlers created Google Chrome and Google Earth using Go, and additionally, even YouTube and Google App Engine use the Go programming language natively. Several of Google’s services were rewritten using Go, and many smaller internal projects at Google are using Go.

Google

Uber

Uber is the Go programming language’s ideal case study remarking more than hundreds of services written in Go. One of the recent examples of Go services in Uber is the geofence service, which matches the user and the driver’s location. Golang is used in writing most of the high GPS services of Uber. Most of the developers at Uber, being well acquainted with C++, Java, and Node, can easily switch and learn to Go without much hassle, which increases the performance at Uber.

To cope with the rise in resource utilization and latencies, Uber uses well-executed Go nodes to solve the issues. Uber refers to Go as a highly reliable programming language, and they have a positive experience with this modern-day language.

Uber

Dailymotion

Dailymotion is a video-streaming platform in France and is available worldwide in over 25 languages. The website improved the performance of its Application Performance Interface APIs using the Go programming language. Golang is helpful for end-to-end tests on the site, which otherwise causes heavy loading. However, Go makes it sturdy and fast. Golang’s static type checking, simplicity, and performance have favored the company well.

Dailymotion

Medium

The famous content publishing platform- Medium uses Golang for its development. GoSocial- one of the Go services manages the Neo4j database. Other image processing and backend services are also taken care of by Go.

Medium

Twitch

Another live video-streaming service uses the Go programming language for its most loaded systems. Golang solves all user-chat-related issues and problems while live video streaming with unique features like efficiency, readability, simplicity, and security. One of the most desirable characteristics of Golang that helped Twitch is the garbage collection factor, which dynamically allocates memory.

Twitch

SendGrid

A cloud-based email transaction service- SendGrid uses Go as its primary programming language. Thanks to Go, the company processes more than 500 million messages daily with asynchronous programming, and it is by far one of the largest companies using Golang. SendGrid’s developers have mentioned that Go solved all their concurrency-related problems and helps reduce maintenance costs.

Sendgrid

Fabric

Fabric is a mobile application development platform that uses Go for its analytics engine. Users get real-time information about their application’s health and performance on this platform. Golang serves the communication protocol of Fabric because it is a highly scalable language.

Fabric

SoundCloud

Along with Ruby on Rails, SoundCloud engineers use the Go programming language for real-time status analysis. As per these engineers, Go is a What-you-see-is-what-you-get language that makes their work easy and saves time because it’s a one-solution language. Go has contributed to over 12 repositories of SoundCloud and six services.

Soundcloud

DropBox

The cloud-computing major DropBox also uses Golang for its efficiency and scalability. Along with the Go in-built libraries, DropBox has built its custom libraries. Golang provides several advantages, like improved caching, standard error interface, Memcache client libraries, and more. Apart from the companies mentioned above, who uses Golang? Netflix, Docker, and many other big brand names use Go for their internal or prime website development. As these companies use the flawless services of Golang for their business benefit attainment, it’s time for your action selection.

Dropbox

Conclusion

Golang has gained significant popularity amongst business enterprises and industry giants that value high performance and scalability and has been growing ever since. As the demand for user-friendly and innovative applications rises, Golang will become the language of choice for businesses that refuse to compromise user experience. Whether you run an eCommerce business, an on-demand service, or a next-gen app concept, Golang is your knight in shining armor.

If you are considering Golang for your next web application development project, then make sure to leverage the advantage of its growing community of developers who contribute to its open-source libraries and tools, ensuring that it remains a viable and relevant language for years to come. Overall, the future of Golang is bright, and it will likely continue to gain popularity and adoption in the years to come.

However, if you still need clarification about Why use Golang for your next web application development project, hire Golang Developers from Bacancy to help you gain conviction and decide if Golang is your ideal language based on your needs and requirements.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Packages in Golang are directories containing source files, and Go programs are made up of packages. These packages compile as executable programs and not as shared libraries. Go program execution begins with the package containing the main() function.

Google, Dropbox, Uber, Dailymotion, Twitch, SoundCloud, etc. use Go programming language.

Some of the in-build supports of Go programming language are:

  • Compression: compress/ gzip
  • Container: container/list,container/heap
  • Web Server: net/htt
  • Database: database/sql
  • Cryptography: Crypto/md5 ,crypto/sha1

Well, Go does not provide support for type-inheritance.

Interface is a type definition in Golang. It represents a set of methods that identifies how an object behaves. You can create an interface in Golang using the word ‘type’ followed by the name of your interface keyword.

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