Go is a compiled, concurrent, garbage-collected, statically typed language. It was developed and open-sourced in 2007 by Google. The Golang’s selling point is in the solid balance between speed, ease, and safety. Its biggest advantage over other languages is support for concurrency.
What is Go most similar to?
Some say Go is the new Java. Others claim Go is C for the 21st century. Both statements are partially true because Go inherited syntax, static typing, and runtime efficiency from the C family. However, Go was influenced by many more programming languages. It has Python’s readability, Limbo’s concurrency, JavaScript’s usability. The main purpose of its creators was to melt the ease of programming of interpreted, dynamically-typed languages with the efficiency and safety of compiled statically-typed languages. They strived to create a completely new language that takes the best of both worlds and makes programming effective and fun.
What is Go used for?
Go is first and foremost a cloud software language. It works well for building any server-side programs, such as pub/sub servers and clients, caching mechanisms, integration layers, and any services performing CPU or I/O intensive tasks. It suits for building any type of API using REST, GraphQL, or gRPC. Go also is good for DevOps tasks, such as writing update scripts, server maintenance software, or batch processing.
Who uses Go?
Go is widely used by companies dealing with cloud computing. Dropbox, Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes were written in Go. Google itself uses Go for Google Cloud Platform, YouTube, Google Chrome download server, and a bunch of smaller projects to improve scalability and performance. You’ll find some well-known names, such as Heroku, SoundCloud, BBC, Basecamp, Bitly, among the adopters of this language.
Will Go replace any other programming languages?
Golang overlaps with and outperforms other languages to some extent. However, it doesn’t mean Go will force out any of them of the market. It rather will carve out some market share and find a niche for itself. The fact is that having realized Go’s superiority in solving scalability and concurrency problems, many companies migrated some of their APIs and microservices from Python, Node, C, or Scala to this language. But they didn’t remove the old languages from their stack completely.
Is Go faster than other programming languages?
If you consider benchmarks for programming language performance comparison, you’ll see that Go is slower than C/C++, somewhat equal to Java, and faster than any other language. Among the factors that slow Golang down, programmers usually mention imperfections of its garbage collection and memory management. Anyway, real-world apps written in Go are known for their fast speed and high performance, especially those that leverage concurrent programming.
Is Go a low-level programming language?
Although Go runs with the speed of low-level languages, it doesn’t really belong to them. The built-in support for garbage collection and memory safety differentiates Go from true low-level languages. Although Go has some low-level features (like pointers), it can’t be used as a system language and is not suitable for kernel development and writing drivers.