Why Is Golang so Popular These Days?

A Brief History of Golang

Golang, also known as “Go,” is a fast, high-performance, open-source compiled programming language that is statistically typed. It was designed at Google by Rob Pike, Robert Griesemer and Ken Thompson and first appeared in Nov 2009. Go is syntactically similar to C and it made its recently stable release 1.13 on September 3, 2019. However, as additions to C, Go offers memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing, and CSP-Style concurrency.

There are two major implementations:

• Google’s self-hosting compiler toolchain targeting multiple OS, mobile devices, and WebAssembly.

• Gccgo, a GCC frontend.

You may also like: Go Language for Beginners in 16 Parts!

Top Reasons to Use Golang to Build Your Next Big Application

Open Source Language

As discussed above, Golang is an open source language, which means it isn't restrictive and anybody can contribute to it.

Easy to Learn

Golang’s syntax is small compared to other languages thus making it easy to learn. The language is easy to understand, can fit in your mind, and you don’t have to spend time looking it up. It’s very clean and easy-to-learn and that even non-Golang developers, those familiar with C, can learn and understand GoLang easily.

Fast Performance

Golang’s small syntax and concurrency model make it a really fast programming language. Golang is compiled to machine code and its compilation process is very fast. Go also links all the dependency libraries into a single binary file thus eliminating the dependency on servers.

Easy Concurrency Model

Golang is built for concurrency. This makes it easy to progress with multiple tasks at the same time. It has "goroutines," lightweight threads that communicate via a "channel." An advantage is that the growable segment stacks in goroutines only use more memory when required.

Portability and Multi-Platform Nature

Go is a cross-platform language. One can easily write code in any environment — OS-X, Linux, or Windows. So, code written in Windows can be compiled and built in a Linux environment.

Explicit Designing for the Cloud

Nowadays, apps are designed to be cloud-native, so programming languages need to be designed keeping the cloud in mind. Golang was written especially for the cloud; this is another reason for the reason for its growth and popularity.

Security

Since Go is statically and strongly typed, it implies that you need to be explicit in the type of data you are passing and it also means that compiler knows the type of every variable respectively. It has a Garbage Collector that cleans up and helps integrates the whole collection into an executable binary. Thus, it makes the entire framework more secure.

Garbage Collection

It has a real-time Garbage Collector (GC) for automatic memory management. This concurrent GC feature makes allocation and removal of objects without any pause and therefore, boosts the efficiency of applications.

Powerful Standard Library

Golang boasts of a standard library, that is full of features that don’t need third-party support. It offers brilliant built-in functions especially for working with primitive types. Go has packages for easily standing up a web server, handling I/O, cryptography, and so on.

Microservice Architecture

A microservice architecture divides the entire application into a set of multiple manageable services. This kind of distributed system enables fast development of apps in a less complex manner. The specialized support services in the Go-kit makes it easy to adopt microservices and reap its benefits.

Golang: Present and Future

Golang is the ideal choice with the excellent combination of concurrency, safety, and simplicity of programming. It is an amazing language for writing web services and can be integrated easily with other services. Top enterprise companies or organizations are using Golang for software and mobile application development. Some big-names that use Golang are YouTube, Uber, Google, Dailymotion, Adobe, BBC, etc. Since the market for Golang is still growing, it seems that the future continues to support this demand.

Further Reading

• Structure of a Go Program. 
• Where Golang Works.
• A Quick Guide to Golang for Java Developers.