Despite common belief, Golang development is not only for big market players. It is used by small and medium companies, startups (in some cases even early-stage). Like other programming languages, it is not an elixir meant to solve all of software development’s problems. So there are several cases when GO language is a perfect, though not irreplaceable, choice.
Despite the fact, that Go is not so widely used as JavaScript or Python, it is among the top 5 most loved and most wanted by software developers, as well as 3d among top paying languages.
Golang is easy to learn, write, and deploy and is very performant. Of course, the choice depends on the focus of your startup, but Golang is designed perfectly for web servers and microservices.
Several words about Golang
Go was first published in 2009, as an open-source programming language developed by a team at Google and the combined effort of other contributors. It is made to simplify the process of software development, particularly for complex architecture and processes.
Go has been proven to be generally faster than languages like Java and Python, which enhances the availability and reliability of services.
Since it is less popular, it may be more difficult and expensive to find and hire Golag developers.
Why companies choose Golang
- Easy to learn, and to bring new people to the ongoing project even if they don’t know Go. The language has syntax that is similar to other programming languages.
- Small memory usage and performance. Go has one of the fastest garbage collectors. It is a form of automatic memory management that helps to control memory allocation. Garbage collection can take a significant proportion of total processing time in a program and, as a result, it can have an impact on performance.
- Concurrency and scalability. In today’s world, it is important to have a high-volume application environment that can support multiple processes simultaneously while not impacting the operation system performance. The Go language has Goroutines, which are managed by Go automatic planner and can run simultaneously and independently. It helps the language to handle high volumes of requests, as QPS (queries per second) rate is a lot better.
- An app’s concurrency is important for enterprise-scale apps or apps that need to handle thousands of requests simultaneously. More concurrent programming language means less chance an app will crash under high load.
- Reliability. No matter how many streams your program is rendering your servers won’t crash.
- Efficiency thanks to channels, a data transfer pipe where data can be passed into or read from. Hence one goroutine can send data into a channel, while other goroutines can read that data from the same channel. It helps to use resources rationally.
- A rapidly growing community of helpful people behind it, for more improvements in the future.
Limitations
- Development time. Go is not for fast launches. Since it is not a descriptive language, a programmer may need to code dozens of lines to accomplish a similar function, which can be done with a couple of lines in Python.
Use cases
Based on the 2020 survey, here is what Golang developers use it most for.
Golang is easy to learn, write, and deploy and is very performant. Of course, the choice depends on the focus of your startup, but Golang is designed perfectly for web servers and microservices.
1. Distributed web apps, when a program runs on more than one computer and communicates through a network. Simple example: web browsers. They require back-end software (servers on the World Wide Web) as well as front-end software installed on your devices (e.g., Chrome, Mozilla). It’s great for microservices and real-time distributed programming.
2. Backend web developments where servers need to deal with heavy requests. Example: E-commerce sites (thanks to concurrency, Golang is able to easily handle millions of traffics per month), late-stage startups with growing users. Even for early-stage startups and MVP if they are building a highly-loaded architecture with huge amounts of traffic suddenly and for a short period of time.
3. Long-term scale systems/apps/services. The simplicity, easiness, performance, plus backed by giant tech companies (Google, Dropbox, Uber, Netflix, etc.), making Go a safe bet.
4. DevOps tooling. It’s a great choice for writing update scripts, server maintenance software, batch processing etc. It’s as fast – if not faster – than Python to write, perform better, and is easier to debug. Examples: Docker, Kubernetes.
5. Again because of its concurrent nature, Golang is essential for blockchain technology, where multiple programs run at the same time. Go has been used for the Bitcoin Lightning Network and Ethereum blockchain.
Anti use cases
1. Artificial intelligence. It needs flexibility, dynamically typed languages.
2. Monolithic application, because it is about large server and big application. while Go is for microservices — small apps with narrowly focused tasks.
3. Microcontroller (Internet of Things). Minimum Go bundle starts from 2MG. Usually, microcontrollers have 5MB of memory. So single bundle will take half of the memory.