For at least the last decade, JavaScript has dominated the market as the most in demand of programming languages. According to a recent study conducted by Stack Overflow in 2017 another programming language has made it on the most wanted languages list -Golang by Google. Since its launch in 2011, companies and developers have migrated over to using Golang, an open source programming language designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.
Golang was intended to be an alternative to C++ when it was first designed, and includes many features influenced from other languages, one in particular being Oberan. As developers began using Go, they found significant advantages in its concurrency, usability, and scalability.
Here are some of the advantages to using Golang:
Made With Concurrency in Mind
When multiple processors carry out instructions simultaneously to increase performance this is known as concurrency processing, as compared to a single core processor. Rob Pike outlines concurrency as “dealing with lots of things at once,” [1] meaning that with concurrency in mind a programming language must be able to work with multi core machines instead of the slower single core versions.
One feature unique to Golang is Goroutines, which was designed specifically to run on multiple threads (processes) to be more effective and immediate versus older languages like JavaScript that use an OS thread and run one at a time. Since Go was designed when multi processors were already implemented, it was built to work with those systems, and would be an easy transition for developers looking to learn Golang.
Easy to Read, Code, and Maintain
Flexibility, readability and the ability to maintain your code are all front of mind for developers when they are introduced to a new language. For developers who use C++, Golang has a similar syntax but is easier to read, which is essential when writing your own code or reading another developer’s work.
Inheritance is not used in Golang either, so a developer can change a class without having to go back to the previous one to make the same adjustment, like they would have to do when modifying code in Java or Python. It’s easy and interesting for developers to use, along with being efficient and quick for computer processors.
Increased Possibilities with Scalability
As an open source language, developers & testers are contributing to and reviewing Go’s source code on its GitHub page. Being maintained by Google as an open source program language has its advantages too.
Google is one of the biggest cloud infrastructures in the world, Go’s scalability is immense with more and more top companies using it today. Development teams at companies like IBM, Uber, Dropbox, Honeywell are moving to Golang, perhaps you should too.
The amount of opportunity for Golang developers is abundant right now and growing larger every day. Developers who have only a few years of experience with Go are being sought after for senior level positions. Our team at ConsultNet is working on multiple opportunities around Golang and witnessed these trends firsthand around this up and coming programming language.
[1] Rob Pike- Concurrency is not parallelism: https://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism