Game-Changing Golang Advantages for your Next Big Project?

Did you know that there are thousands of programming languages out of which Go is one of the highest-paid languages for developers? As per Stack Overflow survey 2021, Go is one of the top paid languages with an average annual pay of $75,669. Over these years, the demand for Golang has dramatically increased. This growth is majorly entitled to the Golang advantages, making it stand out from the competition. So without further ado, let's dive in to know what go language is and why it can be game-changing for your next big project.

What is Go language or Golang?

You must have come across a popular debate- Go vs Golang or the difference between Go and Golang over the internet. So, let’s try to settle it first.

Both Go and Golang are the same. The programming language Go started as an open-source project. However, the slang Golang developed over the years due to the holy merger of ‘Go language’. So, that’s the end of the debate.

So what is Golang, and what are Golang's advantages? Go was developed at Google as an open-source programming language statically typed and compiled. Golang is syntactically very similar to the C programming language but has better features like garbage collection, memory safety, and structural typing.

Golang Syntax-

A simple Golang syntax uses-

1. Package declaration
2. Importing the package
3. Defining the function
4. Statements and expressions

Top 4 Golang advantages to know before using it

Thinking about learning Golang? Here are the top five Golang advantages you should know before you begin with Go-

1. Better concurrency than ever

Google created Go for large-scale distributed systems and server environments. To comply with these requirements, various processes run simultaneously in the background. Go not just makes it happen but does it gracefully, leading to better and brief concurrency.

2. Go is swift

Go is a compiled language just like C and C++, which means once the code is compiled in machine code, it is capable of running on the targeted machine’s processor. This is way faster than the interpreted languages like Python which needs its code to be translated to bytecode after which the interpreter program processes it at runtime. Thus, these are Golang advantages that eliminate these extra steps and offer better speed.

3. The built-in testing framework

Go comes with one more advantage over its competition in that does not rely on an external testing framework to perform unit tests. Go comes with its own built-in testing framework which enables developers to import testing modules in the respective text files and perform testing for the application.

This way, Golang advantages allow developers to run the command line itself by using the ‘go test’ command. This availability of a built-in testing framework enables programmers to write tests first hand and test their code simultaneously.

4. An opinionated language

Go is an opinionated language and is much more strict as compared to languages like Python. In addition to being a statically typed language, it also binds the developer to follow its own dedicated practices.

It also maps out the best approach to deal with common problems and offers a dedicated approach to addressing issues and writing comparatively less error-prone code as compared to other languages like Python.

Top 5 use cases of Go

The top 5 uses of Golang that can show Golang's advantages are-

1. Twitter

Twitter now sees around 10 Billion sessions a day. Hundreds of millions of electronic gadgets send millions of events every second. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, Twitter would have already received and processed over 15,000,000 analytics events. Therefore, to handle all this data and its complexities, Twitter went along Golang’s way.

2. Google

There is a special buzz over the internet regarding- how does Google use Golang internally? So, let’s look into it. Google’s core data solutions team uses Go to maintain services to index web pages across the globe. This helps Google in keeping search results updated. In addition, Chrome’s content management and optimization services utilize the services of Go for better functionality.

3. Microsoft

Microsoft is using Go for internal cloud infrastructure, specifically for services like Azure Container Service, Azure SDK, and Cosmos DB. Microsoft prefers to Go over Azure because it speeds up the execution process, which is the most desirable feature in the cloud.

4. Meta

At Meta, Facebook’s engineering team built a completely new entity framework (ORM) in Go to keep the storage layer dynamic using codegen templates and define the schema as a code.

5. Dropbox

Back in 2014, Dropbox shifted its backend critical code infrastructure from Python to Go. Why did Dropbox do that? ? It was concurrency support and faster execution speed of Golang that motivated Dropbox to undertake the writing of around 200,000 lines of Go code.

Some other popular use cases of Golang are- Twitch Trivago Salesforce Netflix Paypal

Why Golang for your next big project/product?

When working on a big project, it is crucial to choose the best technology that saves time, effort, and money while still addressing the project's needs. Go does it all, and here are the top Golang advantages that make it choosable for your next business project:

1. Saves time and money that goes into development

Unlike the conventional languages like C, Go is a compiled language that enables processors to understand the code directly as it is simply translated into understandable formats. On the other hand, the program in Java is simultaneously compiled into bytecode which is easily executed in the virtual machine. This makes Go way faster than other languages and saves both time and money.

2. Better scalability

Scalability is a major criterion in choosing a programming language for any given project. It can be a nightmare to choose a language that restricts performance when the system needs to adapt to an increase in the workload as per the growing demand. The flexibility to introduce new features into software or app is highly important as well. Go offers this scalability and offers room for executing multiple functionalities at any given point of time, making it a programming language of the future.

3. Large pool of talent

As already discussed, Go is a programming language with high demand as businesses and developers are becoming aware of the benefits of choosing it. Due to this, new developers hone their skills to master this language. So, when Golang is preferred as the desired technology for a project, the businesses gain access to a large pool of talent to test developers’ capabilities and choose the best one from a large pool of talent.

4. Support from the developer community

Golang is a simple, fast, and intuitive language which makes it a preferred choice for developers. It may sound surprising, but there are more than a million Go developers who are proficient in the language and are a part of the Golang developer community. With support from such a big and growing community, one can rest assured of finding support when facing any issues during the development phase of any project.

5. Software/apps are less prone to crashing

The RAM has multiple cores. So when Go is used for a project, it properly uses the processor resources, thus allowing the app to run as a single process in the background. This happens with the help of goroutines that replace threads and need much less RAM. This entire process enables Golang applications to run efficiently without getting crashed or wasting memory.

What are the challenges associated with Golang?

When it comes to the challenges or disadvantages of Go, there are quite a few. As discussed, Go has multiple advantages, but the question is why it is not for every project? Well, the thing is that Google created Go to simplify the implementation as C. But when it comes to a better graphical user interface or better development speed, other languages such as Ruby are chosen by businesses as Go doesn't have its own GUI library. However, Go stands out from the competition when it comes to developing single page apps or developing big projects with standard UI elements. Hence, now you can sort out Golang's advantages.

Best applications built using Go

To better understand the Golang advantages, let’s go through a variety of Golang projects and applications-

- The banking app: Monzo

An online bank based in the UK which has over 5 Million users with an average of £11 billion spent with Monzo in 2020. They have over a thousand microservices which Golang has allowed them to maintain.

- Ridesharing app: Uber

One of the most popular ridesharing services, Uber, is using Golang. The first language used by Uber was Node.js but they needed a faster alternative as they receive an overwhelming number of geofence lookup requests every second. Golang turned out to be the right choice for them as it is perfect to work on multiple CPU cores simultaneously.

- eCommerce app: Allegro

For Allegro, Golang was the first choice since the beginning. Back in 2016, they chose to Go for coming up with a super-fast cache service and handling a large volume of traffic.

- Project Management app: Timesheets

For Timesheets, Golang was the first choice as well. It helped them create a fast, ultra-light, and sufficient app that allows easy integration with other tools such as Jira and Slack. This became possible with Golang’s multithreading capabilities.

- Music app: Soundcloud

Soundcloud chose to Go way before the others. However, they have heavily relied on Ruby on Rails but as a polyglot company, they have added many languages to their backend, and Go is one of them.

- Dating app: Badoo

Badoo is a leading dating app with over $400 Million users globally. With such a high number of users comes an overwhelming number of searches that demand a highly efficient search algorithm to offer a smooth search experience and Golang is the language that provided it all to them.

Future of the Go

According to a popular LinkedIn post, Golang's advantages are continuously going to impact the tech world and its followers. It’s not mainly due to the features like speed, portability, and community support it brings but also the demand of the current market. The Golang advantages are continuously bridging the gap between the supply and demand side and as long as it will keep on doing it will be on the top of the chart. AMEN!

Golang: Final Words

Golang has not been around for a long time but it has still managed to gain immense popularity. The fact that It has its roots attached to Google helped it gain the initial hype. However, the popularity it has gained over the years is much attributed to the Golang advantages that are constantly updating to offer better and more versatile tools for app and software development. if you're an expert Golang dev looking for some awesome new gig try remote work through Turing.