What makes Golang Stand Out, and Why it's Successful

Go is a compiled language partly geared toward OOP, intended to be simple and bloat free at its core. It’s designed to be easy to read and understand, and things like memory allocation are not able to be directly accessed by the programmer, instead are all handled by Go. The syntax is designed to be clean and accessible. It’s also easy to learn for programmers experienced with C++, and converting legacy code to Go is fairly simple. Being a compiled, statically typed language, it’s much faster than interpreted options, and while being much simpler than other compiled languages still offers most of the performance benefits.

While Go doesn’t quite reach the performance of C or C++, it’s much less low level. In comparison to the Java Virtual Machine, Go actually has a lot less overhead, maintains portability, and runs natively. Of course, each of the mentioned languages has a time and place, and where you’d use Go you probably wouldn’t have considered them in the first place.

Go will see very few feature updates in the future, and ones that it will get are small in scope. Many other languages try to implement features that ‘competing’ languages have, which in general causes languages to be less unique.

The creators of Go feel that adding too many features adds complexity and hurts readability, two of their most important philosophies behind Go.

Go can be used for the entire web stack, much like Javascript. In the case of Javascript, one would initially think in theory would be much like trying to make a boat out of screen doors and saran wrap, but in practice works out very well, possibly because screen doors were popular enough to find a way around the lack of buoyancy.

 
After a day on the water, not only does Node.js stay afloat, it runs over 100 thousand websites!

In Go’s case, on the other hand, it’s easy to see why it would make the perfect candidate to do so, which means it has a lot of potential for backend solutions.

Go is also a great option for general performance oriented cloud software. The open source container system Kubernetes is built on go, as well as Docker. Vitess, a Google built distributed database system with a MySQL backend built with Go has been in use by YouTube since 2011.

There’s a lot of general use applications built on Go as well. One of my personal favorites, Syncthing, a P2P file synchronization tool, is also built with Go.

Go has a complex garbage collection system, yet no garbage collection interface. In fact, the Go specification does not mention garbage collection outside of the intro paragraph. This allows you to ignore the problem almost entirely, making programming a lot more straightforward and allows you to focus on solutions for the program’s intended function.

One of the big advantages of something like Go over PHP is concurrency. Running goroutines is several times cheaper computationally than can be accomplished with PHP threads.

There’s always the option of running Go code from PHP, and there are many easy options out there for you to do so. You also have the option to go for something like ZeroMQ or other options that allows intercommunication between services.

Do you have an existing Go project that you need support for or have a new Go project waiting to be tackled? The expert Golang developers at CodeClouds have the experienced and support you need to make sure it’s done right! Of course, if you have a PHP project, we’re still the best place to hire PHP developers offshore.