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golang.adoc

Go: The Good Parts

Table of Contents

Go is a programming language initially developed by Google in 2007. It is a statically typed language with a simple syntax, resembling C or JavaScript. It features garbage collection, type safety and large standard library.

Go can be statically compiled into a single executable binary, which could target a large number of operating systems (from Linux and Windows to Plan 9) and processors (i386, amd64 and ARM).

Note
 In HappyPancake project we found that Golang was a good fit for developing event-driven backend services. Other contenders included Scala, C#, Haskell and Erlang.

Good parts

  • Concise and simple syntax, easy to get started with.

  • Good facilities for writing concurrent programs that share state by communicating (goroutines and channels).

  • Good ecosystem for developing backend servers, all major drivers and libraries are available.

  • Decent integration story with native code.

  • Lightweight development stack with major IDE-like features provided by command-line tools (and available in different editors).

  • Unified formatting style for the language, provided by gofmt.

  • Compilation is fast even with large projects.

  • Go supports all major OSes and CPU architectures.

Not so good parts

  • You must set and tweak GOMAXPROCS variable for each program which needs parallel execution.

  • You can build web applications and native UIs with Golang, but ecosystem there is rather immature, if compared to the other platforms.

  • Debugging golang code is neither easy nor reliable.

  • Golang has prominent explicit error handling style; if followed blindly, it can turn code into a spaghetti of error checks.

  • Golang stores all dependencies as folders in GOPATH, e.g. abdullin/chk. Having a single global workspace makes things tricky, when you need to work with multiple versions of a library.

Note
 This is the state of Golang at the moment of writing. Things will improve over time.
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