What is Golang?

What is Golang? Intro and Use-Cases of Go Programming Language

Many people are new to Golang.  People have heard of this programming language, they know it exists, it’s a cool language, and people want to learn more.  

Developers want attractive wages, and more money and are seeking a multipurpose programming language.

But first people are kind of curious, where did it come from?  Go programming language seems like it exploded overnight in popularity.  

Table of Contents

What is Golang? Or Is It Go or Golang Programming Language?

You may see both Golang and Go programming languages. Golang is just another name for Go. Go is still officially known.

The Go project is an open-source programming language. Go is an open-source programming language that makes it easy to build simple scripting language, reliable data science, and efficient software.

The Go programming language is an open-source project to make programmers more productive. Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient.

Where did Go or Golang come from?

Six years ago it was open sourced and before that, it was a closed-source project internally at Google.  The whole idea was rather than writing very big servers, with big machines, many cores, many developers, all of that thing.  

It was created at Google in 2007 by legends who know their stuff like Ken Thompson the inventor of the b and c programming languages. Version 1.0 was released as open-source software in 2012.

It was designed for simplicity and efficiency and that’s why we call it Go and not Golang. 

Open Source Programming Language

Go is a free-form, new programming language built-and-compiled program language developed by Google software development. The cloud-native development is a lightweight, highly efficient system and more straightforward than other languages for cloud-based programming for multiple tasks.

Why is Golang a Good Programming Language?

Unlike other programming languages, Go publicly announced ease of use

Golang is useful for carrying out programming for scalable servers and large software systems. The Golang programming languages were built to fill in the gaps of C++ and Java that Google came across while working with its servers and distributed systems.

Is Golang the same as C++ and other programming languages?

A language called C++ interacts with a machine’s hardware directly whereas Golang interpreting can be interpreted with a greater degree until it can be understood. C++ has an incredibly low syntax compared to higher-level programs in many respects.

So, with Go basically what they tried to do is, let’s remove all of the fancy things and go down to the simplest possible tool that can do the job. That result is Go. I used to write C++ and assumed you needed a powerful language. 

Then, when I start writing Go, I realized that that was pretty wrong because at the end of the day if you have a tool that works very well.

Go Programming Language: Easy Learning Curve

The good thing is that since the tool is so simple, it allows you to focus on the problem you’re trying to solve rather than how you’re solving it.  So, there are a lot of big projects like Kubernetes. Kubernetes is far from being simple. But it uses Go. 

The cool thing is that that allows people to come and have to understand the concepts of how Kubernetes works on pods and services and all these things, and not having to take that much time into understanding how that translates into Go.

Just A Few Hours To Get Started With Go Language

What is Golang good for? - Simplicity

Go is simple to read. That’s the whole point. I love it simple, yet powerful.  So, when we’re talking about C++.  I’ve written some code in C++ you have to do all this memory allocation, and deallocation, there are pointers, and it’s crazy.  So, how does Go manage teaching abilities and the powerfulness of C++ but still keep it simple?  

In C++ you need to do all of the things. In Go, you’re not allowed to do any of the things, that’s way simpler.  You have pointers, but you cannot delete them.  There’s a garbage collection that does all of these things. 

You don’t decide whether something is allocated on the heap or the stack, you don’t decide.

There are many of these things as a C++ programmer or like low-level programming and you’re like, “How am I going to do anything with this?” Then, you just give up, accept the way of Go and you just start writing code.

It’s very effective, surprisingly, and at the end of the day, is actually around the same performance as C++ on the memory side of things.

Google Cloud Platform And Go

Have you used Google Cloud? If so, congratulations! You have already been using Go for multiple tasks with the stand-alone tools. The efficient code for data processing limits runtime errors with low CPU usage.

Unused memory allows other compiled languages for static typing and cloud computing.

Major Cloud Providers

Tech companies often experience hyper growth and Go makes it easy for a company to scale. As applications and processing move to the cloud, concurrency becomes a very big issue.

Web Applications

American Express uses Go for payments and rewards. Facebook built an entity framework in Go.

Does Go Programming Language Run On A Virtual Machine?

Go doesn’t rely on a virtual machine to compile its code. It gets compiled directly into a binary file for web development

Command Line Interfaces

Command-line Interfaces (CLIs) developers use to go to head out of the office before anyone else because they can leverage fast compile times to build programs that start quickly.

Command Line Tools

My favorite one is Go doc. If you do Godoc of this package, you will get the same message.  We do Godoc of fmt, you get much more than that. You will get the full documentation, which is pretty big, with all the different functions that appear in fmt.

What if I care about a specific function? Well, I can do Godoc fmt Printf, and that will give me the documentation for that specific function.  

What About Generic Functions?

With generics, you can declare and use functions or types that are written to work with any of a set of types provided by calling code. Go developers released publicly a well-suited func main and networking features.

You can get started with the Go code:

(1) Create a folder for your code

(2) Add non-generic functions.

(3) Add a generic function to handle multiple types.

(4) Remove type arguments when calling the generic function.

(5) Declare a type constraint and hit enter.

Robust Standard Library

Languages like Go language has network services, package main import, code reusability, structural typing, memory safety and Go file. Different languages written in Go have easy-to-read documentation in the standard library.

What are the limitations of GoLang?

Although simple Go has its shortcomings, it does still have problems. Go’s simplicity means there may not be a lot of descriptive words to speak of. Using Python, several lines may be required. Developers may find the code unorganized than different languages.

Go’s a little younger compiled language and the language thus dates back nearly 10 years. It’s relatively new compared to most of the traditional language releases of the 1980s Java, Python, and other programming languages.

Notable Companies

Google, PayPal, Meta, Netflix, and more organizations in every industry use Go to power their software and services. For example,

GoLang’s Support

So for someone interested in Go, where do they go?

Golang.org is the homepage of Go.  So, that’s where you’re going to find all of the things.  There’s a tour, which is super useful, I recommend trying it, you don’t necessarily need to do the whole thing the first day.  Don’t worry about that but have a try at that.

Absolute Beginner – Go Here

There’s also a bunch of online resources, the best place to find them probably is going to be on the Gophers Slack, so gophers.slack.com. There are a lot of people in there. No one will judge you if you have questions, that’s the whole objective of the channel anyway with good documentation.

Supportive And Active Community

Check out Twitter on golang.org.  The Twitter Tag, @golang is a nice place to see whether there are new releases, new talks, and things like this.  

Juistin Davis