Everything About GO Programming

‘GO’ programming language or often referred to as ‘GOLANG’, is a programming language created by Google. Around 2009, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson announced the language and started developing it. The Golang originated as an experiment by Griesemer, Pike, and Thompson in an attempt to design a programming language that would overcome the common criticisms of other languages while retaining their positive features. The logo of Golang appears as in the image. GO is a statically typed compiled language following the tradition of C, with the better features of Java and other languages. The examples of this feature include memory safety, garbage collection (as in Java), structural typing, concurrency and a lot more.

The language was officially announced in 2009, and its first version was released in 2012. The language geeks and those who are always seeking for new opportunities to learn to programme in different languages. Google opened a whole new dimension for such techies, by making the Golang an open source programming language. Anyone can freely contribute to the GO language by creating new codes, proposals, fixing the existing bugs, making it smarter, faster and easier. It won’t be wrong to describe it as a baby growing in front of you. Learning, developing, and evolving with every next step and being a better version of its own self.

The best that can be said about GO is, in words of Robert Griesemer “Go wouldn’t be possible without the rest of the Go team and certainly not without the open source community.” He described the evolution of GO in his own words in GopherCon 2015. For all those who want to learn advanced computer programming can move to GO as it is a boom and is the new coming technology giant. Nothing turns on a developer or programmer the way a new programming language does, right?

So here is all about the Golang one might need to know or need to learn Go language from scratch. For those who are a good language learner, can directly begin with trying codes in the open source and join the community of millions of learners that are using GO as of today using either of the GO language compilers. There are three known compilers of Golang, viz., Google’s GO Toolchain, GCCGO, and the GopherJS. And for all those aspiring to learn GO language can visit the Udemy website with all available lectures and organized content.

To learn Go language, one must keep in mind, “The simpler the code, the easier is debugging and maintaining.” Just because it allows the coder to make simpler, faster and parallel codes to run with ease, one must not end up making every line of code or module run in a parallel thread. Concurrent processes are hard to maintain and difficult to debug which may make you wonder whether your shared objects are really synchronized or not and many such issues may surface. Though Goroutines solves most of these problems, yet complexity and logic are something that one needs to code on his own. Keeping that in mind, one must try to keep his code simple and efficient.

Daisuke Maki, a GO/Perl/C programmer, and an author has put forward a simple seven stages flow to learn the go language which can motivate and guide any language learner so as for how to approach learning Go. In his article, he defines seven stages of how to walk the path of enlightenment to the language Go. These stages not only provide a clear guidance on how to approach learning the language GO but also clear the simple myths that the language fundamentals give.

The GO language fundamentals include:

1. GO language is concise, simple and safe.
2. Its compilation time is very fast.
3. It provides environment based adaptive patterns quite similar to dynamic language.
4. It supports embedded and the interface type.
5. It doesn’t require any external dependencies for statically linked native binaries.

Considering these features, all the questions that might arise or the confusion that can surface. All such queries are answered in brief in this article (Link). However, for basics, one can say that Go is a language with all the positive and beneficial features of the mother language C, the robustness of Java and dynamicity of Ruby and Python. For better help to learn go language, you can visit the following links given on the official site for Golang:

1. For basic and to begin with Golang Site
2. For frequent queries: FAQ’s
3. For docs on web applications: Docs

More such link and content can be browsed on the Golang site and any Golang language learner can use this to go through all the content. One must have a clear understanding of the basics and how to structure the code properly.

The GO language was not brought just to implement robustness or such features, but it came as a result of frustration from the existing languages and features these languages could offer. One had to learn programming in multiple languages to fulfil any project demanding robustness, complexity and efficiency. Any programmer had to choose either safety or ease of coding and efficiency. And the choice of human’s was but obvious. That’s why Google came up with GO to remove all the anomalies and provide an overall solution to such issues. Go tries to resolve these issues by attempting to provide a combination of ease of dynamic language and efficiency and safety of a statically typed language.

The main issues Google faced in making such a language were an expressive yet light weighted system, rigid dependency and concurrency with garbage collection for memory usage and so on. The article GO at Google provides an understanding and complete overview of the motivation and background behind the Go language.

However, as any other language GO also has its limitations. The major criticism that Golang faces are:

1. Lack of compile-time generics.
2. No static checks for metaprogramming.
3. No generic algorithm in the standard library.
4. Lack of exceptions making some error handling difficult.
5. Garbage Collection overhead limits use in systems programming.

Dave Astels at Engine Yard wrote: “Go is extremely easy to dive into. There are a minimal number of fundamental language concepts and the syntax is clean and designed to be clear and unambiguous. Go is still experimental and still a little rough around the edges.”

Though Go programming language has come a long way since the time of its first version release, the Golang has a long way to develop through offering a lot of opportunities to dwell in. As the statement goes for the programmers “Learn each day and implement in each minute”.