Why is Go Programming Language Trending Right Now?

Have you ever wondered why businesses after using a programming language for several years migrate to a new language? That’s one of the questions that you will be asking yourself, as the decade-old Go programming language is getting more recognition. 

What does transitioning to a new programming language involve? It essentially needs new resources, quality training, and most importantly hiring programmers who are experts in that language. Besides, it means letting go of most of the works that have been accomplished on old platforms.

To facilitate the need to deliver a faster and more responsive app experience, businesses have chosen to leverage the benefits of Go. In the modern times of multicore processors and high-speed internet, Go has risen to fame with the potential of creating exponentially faster apps. 

So, let’s understand the Go programming language , why developers are getting all excited about it and why it is trending right now.

What is Go?

Go is an open-source programming language developed by Google and launched in 2009. At the time of Go’s inception, computers had become enormously quicker since languages such as C, C++, and Java were first developed but the act of programming had not advanced nearly as much and most of the computers were not multiprocessors. 

Some of the key considerations of the Go language were to provide first-class support for some sort of concurrency, safe automatic memory management, enabling tooling, automating mundane tasks such as code formatting, and removing obstacles to working on large codebases. So, the purpose of creating Go was to address all these undue complexities.

History of Go

Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson started working on the new language on September 21, 2007. With the design work progressing in parallel, by January 2008, Ken Thompson started working on the compiler producing C code as its output. In May 2008, Ian Bell joined this full-time project to make a GCC front end for Go. Towards the end of 2008, Russ Cox helped with moving libraries and the language from prototype into production. 

Go became a public open-source project on November 10, 2009. Countless people from the community have contributed to ideas, discussions, and code. Renée French was roped in by Google to design the popular mascot and logo – Gopher. 

Go is Here to Stay – The Stats Don’t Lie

According to the TIOBE Index, Go was the language of the year in 2009 and 2016. It rose to the top 10 in the list of programming languages, by climbing to #10 in March 2020. The below graph shows us a month-by-month breakdown of ratings of Go as per the TIOBE Index. Over the past 3 years, the ratings had pretty much remained the same, and demand for Go had been high.

According to the Go Developer Survey 2019, a majority of respondents agreed that Go is working well for their teams (86%) and that they would prefer to use it for their next project (89%). Also, over half of respondents (59%) believe Go was critical to the success of their companies. You might notice that the indicators had remained stable since 2016.

When satisfaction across industries was used to establish a baseline, respondents were positive about using Go at work, regardless of industry sector. 

According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020,  Go saw big gains, moving up to 5th from 10th last year.

Advantages of Go

Fast

Go is a compiled language, i.e, the code written is directly translated in processor understandable format. Meanwhile, a Java program is compiled into bytecode that is executed by a virtual machine.

Go is like a leaner organizational structure in business, where the absence of mid-level managers improves the speed of getting things done. Go is lightweight than languages like Java and Python, which enhances the availability and reliability of services.

Easy to Learn

Go is easy for software developers to grasp, particularly if they already have a solid foundation in C or Java. The one thing that you might notice is that the keywords and syntax might differ but Go has the same procedural approach that developers would have problems in familiarizing quickly.

Scalable

One of the reasons why Go is popular is its ability to support concurrency. It has Goroutines, which are simply functions that can run simultaneously and independently.

Goroutines take up only a negligible size of 2 kB of memory, facilitating high scalability when the need for running multiple concurrent processes comes up. Unlike Java threads, which are blocking and heavy by nature, Goroutines are non-blocking and light-weight. Goroutines is the combination of the async approach used by JavaScript and the traditional multithreading used by Java. 

Development Tools

Being an open-source initiative, you’ll have no problems in acquiring the development tools for your team. There are several plugins, IDEs, and editors that you can download from the GitHub repository for Go.  A lot of cloud-based IDEs that support Go are also available.

Pool of Resources

According to Hired, Go is the #1 in-demand programming language across the globe. There is a growing awareness of how powerful Go is, and programmers are starting to take to the language like fish to water. It is quite clear that Go will accumulate a huge pool of talent in due course of time. 

Disadvantages of Go

Time Consuming

Go is not as descriptive as Python. A programmer has to code dozens of lines in Go to accomplish a similar function that can be done with a couple of lines in Python. The prolonged duration spent in coding is a spoiler for teams working in agile environments and rushing against deadlines to deliver their software. 

Young Language

Though Go celebrated its 10th anniversary last year, it is still a relatively young language. While interfacing with other platforms, developers may struggle with the existing libraries. To patch multiple programs together, your team has to deal with writing extra code because there is a lack of SDK for 3rd party interfaces.

Lack of Support for Generic Functions

Generic functions are a collection of different functions with the same name, but with undefined types of inputs during compile time. Just like C, which Go is based on, the lack of support for generic functions severely limits code reusability and decrease efficiency during development. Go helps developers to a certain extent with the development of empty interfaces. There are areas of development that Go isn’t suited where languages like Python are better options.

Companies that Use Go

The Go language ensures code efficiency, which results in the delivery of faster software development and apps for businesses. Companies that recognize the need for lean and efficient code have adopted it. Here are some famous firms that have done so:

Go was developed based on the C language. Go inherits the syntax of C, albeit with some changes and feature improvements that allow developers to manage memory safely. This helps to eradicate memory leakage problems when developers do not release unused memory by mistake.

Projects Best Suited for Go

While Go is known for its simplicity and speed of execution of the code, developers need to write more code when compared to a scripting language like Python. 

Go was created to address software issues of scalability, where resources are constrained due to hardware. Put in simple terms, Go is useful when it is addressing bottleneck issues in processing time. 

For instance, startups with rapidly growing user base will face severe scalability issues and the backend would be struggling to cope with the high volume of activity.Go comes to the rescue in such situations by handling heavy requests with its support for concurrency functions and small memory footprint.

Dropbox, the popular cloud-storage sharing service, uses Go to handle more than 500 million users on its network efficiently. It is also perfect for building e-commerce sites, with millions of transactions every month.Finally, Go also powers resource-intensive services like Terraform, Kubernetes, and Docker. 

When you are at the stage of idea validation, it is best to not go with the language.

As explained earlier, it takes time to code and this can significantly affect the end output. However, once you are advised to have a backup plan to move to Go when the current code becomes buggy and affects user experience.

When to Migrate the Project to Go

If your plan involves offering on-demand services or expanding e-commerce functions on your current business, shifting to Go is a wise option. If the software grows and new features are added, developers may struggle to read existing codes written by their predecessors. Such issues can result in increased response times during troubleshooting and maintenance.

Netflix has rewritten its Rend service for connection management in Go. Uber has used the efficiency of Go to scale its geofence microservice for increasing its service delivery speed. Salesforce by anticipating the possibility of having readability issues has switched over to Go for its Einstein Analytics.

If there is a need for quick server responses, or you are anticipating a surge in service demand that might lead to system crashes, it is the best option to choose Go.

Final Thoughts

It’s been some time since the developer community got excited over a new programming language. Golang, a brilliant initiative by Google, is poised to benefit enterprises across various industries. Go could well be the deciding factor in shaping your software strategy and delivery for the near future.

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