What is the Go or Golang programming language?

Introduction

Go, also known as Golang or Go, is an open-source programming language developed by Google. Software developers use Go on a range of platforms and frameworks to develop web applications, cloud and network services, and other types of software.

Go is statically typed, explicit, and modeled after the C programming language. Go's fast startup time, low runtime overhead, and ability to run without a virtual machine (VM) have made it a very popular language for writing microservices and other applications. In addition, Go is used for concurrent programming—the strategy of executing multiple tasks at once, out of order or in partial order.

Go is inspired by the efficiency and relative simplicity of Python. It uses goroutines, or lightweight processes, and a set of packages for efficient dependency management. It is designed to solve several problems, including slow build times, uncontrolled dependencies, duplication of effort, difficulty in writing automated tools, and cross-language development.

Here are some of the key features of Go:

Simplicity: Go is designed to be easy to learn and use. Its syntax is simple and straightforward, making it a good choice for beginners and experienced programmers alike.
Concurrency: Go has built-in support for concurrency, allowing developers to write efficient and scalable code for multi-core and distributed systems.
Garbage Collection: Go has automatic memory management that frees developers from worrying about memory allocation and deallocation.
Fast compile time: Go has a fast compiler that makes it easy to iterate quickly during development.
Cross-platform support: Go can be compiled to run on many different platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Strong typing: Go is a statically typed language that helps detect errors at compile time and not at runtime.
Go has a large and growing community of developers and is used by many well-known companies including Google, Uber, and Dropbox.

Here are some important points about the Go programming language:

Go is a statically typed language, meaning that the type of a variable must be declared before it can be used.
Go has a built-in garbage collector that automatically frees memory when it is no longer needed.
Go has strong support for concurrency, allowing developers to write efficient and scalable code for multi-core and distributed systems.
Go has a minimalist syntax that is easy to learn and read.
Go has a fast compiler that produces code that is optimized for modern hardware architectures.
Go has a standard library that supports a wide range of functions, including networking, encryption, and file management.
Go has a growing community of developers and a vibrant ecosystem of third-party packages and tools.
Go is used by many famous companies to build large-scale distributed systems and high-performance applications.
Overall, Go is a powerful and efficient programming language that is well-suited for building modern applications and distributed systems. Its strong support for concurrency and minimalist syntax make it an attractive choice for developers who want to build scalable and efficient applications.

Go also has a simple syntax and a simple type system, making it easy to learn and use even for people with no prior programming experience.

Here's a "Hello World" program in Go:

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
fmt.Println("Hello, World!")
}

There are various online IDEs like The Go Playground, repl.it, etc. that can be used to run Go programs without installation.
To install Go on your PC or laptop, we need the following two software: Text Editor and Compiler.
Text Editor: A text editor provides you with a platform in which to write your source code. The list of text editors is given below:

Windows Notepad
OS Edit command
Brief
Epsilon
vm or vi
Emacs
VS Code

Finding a Go compiler: The Go distribution is available as installable binaries for FreeBSD (version 8 and above), Linux, Mac OS X (Snow Leopard and above), and Windows operating systems with 32-bit (386) and 64-bit (amd64) x86 processor architectures.

Writing your first program in Go:

package main 
import "fmt"
func main() {
// prints geeksforgeeks
fmt.Println("Hello, geeksforgeeks") 
}

Go program syntax explanation:

Line 1: Contains the main program package, which contains the overall content of the program. It is the starting point for program execution, so it is mandatory to write it.

Line 2: Contains the import statement “fmt”. In Go (Golang), the import statement is used to include external packages that provide additional functionality beyond the built-in language features. In this case, “fmt” is a package that provides functions for formatting input and output.

Line 3: The main function starts the program execution.

Line 4: fmt.Println() is a standard library function to print something as output on the screen. In this package fmt has shipped the Println method which is used to display the output.

Comment: Comments are used to explain code and are used in a similar way in Java or C or C++. Compilers ignore comment entries and do not execute them. Comments can be single-line or multi-line.

Why this “Go language”?

Because Go is an attempt to combine the programming ease of an interpreted and dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a typed and compiled language. It also aims to be modern with support for networked and multi-core computing.

What is there in other languages, except Go?

Go strives to reduce typing in both senses of the word. Throughout its design, the developers worked to reduce clutter and complexity.
There are no forward declarations and no header files. Everything is declared exactly once.
Stuttering is reduced by simple type derivation using the := declare-and-initialize construct.
There is no hierarchy of any kind: the types just are, they don't have to declare their relationships.

Hardware limitations

We have seen that in a decade, hardware configuration and processing is changing at a very slow rate. In 2004, P4 had a clock speed of 3.0 GHz and now in 2018, Macbook pro has a clock speed of almost (2.3 GHz vs 2.66 GHz). To speed up the performance, we use more processors but using more processor also increases the cost. And because of this we use limited processors and using limited processor we have a heavy programming language whose Threading takes more memory and reduces the performance of our system. Hence to overcome such problem Golang is designed in such a way that instead of using threading it uses Goroutine which is similar to threading but consumes much less memory.
Like threading consumes 1 MB while Goroutine consumes 2KB of memory, so at the same time, we can launch millions of Goroutines.
So the point discussed above makes Golang a powerful language that handles C++ and Java at the same time.

Advantages and disadvantages of Go Language

Advantages:

Flexible – concise, simple, and readable.
Concurrency – This allows multiple processes to run simultaneously and efficiently.
Fast result – its compilation time is very fast.
Library – Provides a rich standard library.
Garbage Collection – One of the key features of Go is that Go excels at providing a lot of control over memory allocation and has dramatically reduced latency in the latest versions of garbage collection.
Validates for interface and type embedding.
Concurrency: Go provides excellent support for concurrency, making it easy to write code that can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. This is achieved through goroutines and channels, which allow you to write code that can execute multiple operations simultaneously.
Performance: Go is designed to be fast and efficient, with a focus on performance and low memory consumption. This makes it well-suited for building high-performance network services as well as solving complex computational problems.
Simplicity: Go has a simple syntax and a simple type system, making it easy to learn and use even for people with no prior programming experience.
Garbage Collection: Go has a built-in garbage collector that automatically manages memory for you. This eliminates the need for manual memory management and reduces the chance of memory leaks and other bugs that can arise from manual memory management.
Statically Typed: Go is a statically typed language, meaning that types are determined at compile time. This provides stronger type safety and makes it easier to detect type errors before they occur.

Disadvantages:

It has no support for generics, even though there is a lot of discussion about it.
The packages distributed with this programming language are very useful, but Go is not very object-oriented in the conventional sense.
Some libraries are missing, especially a UI toolkit.
Limited object-oriented features: Go lacks full object-oriented features such as inheritance and polymorphism. This can make writing complex programs more difficult, especially for developers accustomed to traditional object-oriented languages.
No Generics: Go does not have built-in support for generics, which makes it difficult to write reusable code.
Immature standard library: The Go standard library is relatively new and still maturing, which can make it difficult to find the tools you need for a specific task.

Some popular applications developed in Go language

Docker: A set of tools for deploying Linux containers
Openshift: A cloud computing platform as a service by Red Hat.
Kubernetes: The Future of Unified Automated Deployment Processes
Dropbox: Moved some of its critical components from Python to Go.
Netflix: For two parts of their server architecture.
InfluxDB: is an open source time series database developed by InfluxData.
Golang: The language itself is written in Go.

What is the Go or Golang programming language?

Introduction