Go language or better known as Golang, is a programming language conceptualized by Google in 2009. Golang has similarities with C (a tool for professional programmers). However, Golang definitely goes beyond the updated version of C. With the constant challenge among software developers to learn C++, Golang has been found easier to learn thus explains why many people are starting to learn the programming language.
Why should you learn Go?
1. Less hardware limitations
There is a need for new programming languages like Go because of the hardware limitations that other programming languages possess. Over the years, the single-thread performance and the frequency of the processor became stagnant for a decade (Patel, 2017). Now, some people would think that adding more transistors is a good thing, but it actually isn’t. The reason for this is that when you take a look at the graph more deductively, quantum properties start to emerge.
Given the chart above, placing more transistors then, would significantly cost people more. It is because of this that manufacturers have been needing to add more cores to processors, introduce hyper-threading, and add more cache to increase performance.
Analyzing the whole trend of the graph in layman’s terms basically means that it is becoming more difficult to conduct and introduce hardware improvements as time goes by.
It is for this reason that when hardware improvements are difficult to do, one of the choices to make is to create a more efficient software that is less taxing when it comes to the hardware processors, thereby increasing performance substantially.
2. Goroutines are built with concurrency in mind
The next reason why Go language is necessary for most software developers today is that most of the modern programming languages (Java, Python etc.) have existed during the 90’s single thread environment. While these programming languages support multi-threading, most of the problems now come in the aspect of concurrent execution, race conditions, deadlocks, and threading-locking.
Go has first-class concurrency because of the existence of goroutines, which are much similar to threads but generally possess a lighter memory. This makes it less taxing with regard to the hardware performance of the programming language. Go being established in 2009 where multithreading has already existed means that Go is built with concurrency in mind.
As compared to other threads in different programming languages, Go’s goroutines only take up approximately 2KB of memory than a more or less 1MB memory of the others (this is more burdensome for when we’re talking about hardware performance). This means that the smaller the memory of the thread, the better, because then it also means it has the capability of having more storage for more threads.
3. They contain a much simpler syntax
Go, among other programming languages, is easy to maintain simply because they do not require a complicated code for it to work. Not only is having a crazy programming syntax more time consuming, but it is also unnecessarily making the code convoluted. Generally speaking, messy codes make it hard to follow and maintain.
Go’s coding syntax is absent of classes, does not support inheritance, no constructors, no annotations, no generics, and no exceptions. This makes most things a lot easier to modify.
In the graph above, we talk about the efficiency and code readability of programming languages as strategically placed along two axes (x-axis for efficiency, y-axis for code readability) (Patel, 2017). This is a win for Go since it maximizes on efficiency while not sacrificing its code readability.
Conclusion
Go language was built in 2009 while bearing in mind the already existing gaps from present languages with the hopes of being able address them. Certainly enough, Go did deliver. This is one of the things that are making Go popular among many software developers today.
While there is no one programming language that seeks to address all software developer needs, Go will certainly be a part of those ideal programming languages to use in 2022, and in the succeeding years. If you’re looking for signs to start using the language today, this is certainly it!
Let us know your thoughts about Go language! Reach out to us at www.pro5.ai.