What's so great about Go?

To paraphrase the indie band Cracker, what the world needs now is another programming language like I need a hole in the head. That said, Go has slowly  but surely inundated the development world like a creeping vine, covering everything that came before it in a lush—and in many ways superior—cover of programming power. With its growing popularity, there are a number of reasons you should take a closer look at it.

The story goes that Google engineers designed Go while waiting for other programs to compile. Their frustration at their toolset forced them to rethink system programming from the ground up, creating a lean, mean, and compiled solution that allows for massive multithreading, concurrency, and performance under pressure. 

Running Go on modern hardware—and even inside containers or on virtual machines—can be a real pleasure. Because Go was designed to run on multiple cores, it is built to support concurrency and scale as cores are added. Further, its multithreading capabilities—most specifically, its goroutines—are a surprising and welcome addition to your bag of tricks.

Built for concurrency

Before we dig in further, let’s look at goroutines. These are essentially concurrent functions that run while the rest of the program completes. In other words, you can fire off a goroutine, have it run, and keep going while it and thousands of its brethren process in the background. Network timeout? Don’t worry, your goroutine will manage it while the main loop continues. Complete database failure? Your goroutine will know, and you can gracefully work around the issue.

Take a look at this simple example:

package main
import (
  "fmt"
  "time"
)
func hello() {
  fmt.Println("Hello world goroutine")
}
func main() {
  go hello()
  time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
  fmt.Println("main function")
}

The main function works just like it does in C. In this code, main fires off a goroutine—indicated by the go keyword—called hello(). The program takes a quick nap and then continues. If anything were to happen in the hello() function, the main function wouldn’t notice. All that’s important is the work is done.

The program finishes when the main routine wakes up and fires off a Println. The hello() function could be anything—a data call, a transaction, a queue entry—and it would run while the rest of the program churns along. Like the aforementioned vine, think of goroutines as little flowers that branch off and die while the main vine keeps going.

Want to see it in action? Check out this snippet at the Go Playground and you’ll see just how goroutines work.

This feature alone is worth the price of admission. For web apps, goroutines let you run concurrent jobs while avoiding roadblocks. If you’re waiting for data input, for example, a goroutine can fire off to supply pre-populated text even as the user is typing. In other words, your program will keep running even if the concurrent processes take longer than expected.

Best of all, goroutines are cheap, making Go fast.

“The Goroutines are multiplexed to fewer number of OS threads,” wrote Naveen Ramanathan  on GoLangBot, a Go learning resource. “There might be only one thread in a program with thousands of Goroutines. If any Goroutine in that thread blocks, say, waiting for user input, then another OS thread is created and the remaining Goroutines are moved to the new OS thread. All these are taken care of by the runtime and we, as programmers, are abstracted from these intricate details and are given a clean API to work with concurrency.”

Why should you learn Go?

You’ve probably seen some tweets or blogs in recent years arguing that Go is better than Perl/Python/C/etc. We’ve all been using something—heck, I even use command line PHP—to do little things on our servers. Want to watch a log? Perl. Want to send out regular tweets? Python. Want to manage incoming data from thousands of concurrent users? Java or C++ was always your answer. So is Go “better”? 

Well, Go, can do all of that. Go ensures that your toolbox is compilable across all platforms and on all hardware. It uses a surprisingly simple package management solution that “just works” and it is extremely portable. You can easily replace your scripting languages with Go and your compiled languages will definitely get a run for their money when stacked against Go solutions.

Go is built for software engineering today. Not everything new is great, but when a programming language is designed for exactly the environment most of us use right now—scalable, cloud-based servers that are optimized for performance—a lot can go right. Go is compilable on nearly any machine, so you can use it to create a full webapp or a tool to clean up incoming data for processing. Like Perl before it, Go is a Swiss Army knife, but one that has stripped off all of the overhead and extra junk that has accreted onto programming platforms over the past few decades.

Go is simple. As a dev, I’ve been able to pick up languages and frameworks over a long weekend. This gives me an understanding of a few important platforms and, since I don’t have to code daily, enough rope to hang myself when it comes to creating little side projects. Go has been different. For folks who already know the basics of programming or a few other languages, learning Go takes a few hours at most. Once you know its tricks, you’re ready to code. Again, because it is so fast, you’ll want to use it for nearly everything you used command line interpreters for, thereby replacing your bash scripts, Python sketches, and Java efforts. 

Go is fast. Take a look at this clever to-do list in Go by Mohamad Fadhil. The code is quite simple—set up a MySQL database in Docker, add in a bit of HTML, and almost instantly you have a super fast web app that compiles at the command line. What’s more, Fadhil explores why he likes Go in the first place: speed.

In a regex test—regex-redux —Go ran in 3.55 seconds while Java ran in 5.58. The Go program weighed in at 102 lines of code, while the Java program weighed in at 70. True, Go was a little heftier than Java, but given the speed at which Go bested the next most popular system language, it’s clear you’re not sacrificing speed.

Go is on course to take over many open source and private projects and as it becomes more useful as a standard language for both microservices and the web. It could start replacing less performant solutions like Java and C.

Don’t take my word for it. Check out GoLang.org for advice on writing web applications, command line tools, and services. 

“Personally, I believe Go is the new Java. Many open-source projects (e.g., Jaeger, Kubernetes, Docker, InfluxDB, Serf, etc.) are now written in Go. In contrast, the older projects (e.g., Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, etc.) are written in Java,” wrote Fadhil.

Go is like chess or, well, the game of Go: it takes a moment to learn and a lifetime to master. Luckily, unlike chess, Go’s difficulty goes down with experience and soon you’ll be coding fast and furious programs in one of the world’s most modern languages.

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