In only two years, Golang
leaped from the 65th most popular programming language to #17. Here's what's
behind its rapid growth.
The Go programming language, sometimes referred to as Google's golang, is making strong gains in
popularity. While languages such as Java and C continue to dominate
programming, new models have emerged that are better suited to modern
computing, particularly in the cloud. Go's increasing use is due, in part, to
the fact that it is a lightweight, open source language suited for today's
microservices architectures. Go is also gaining ground
in data science, with strengths that data scientists are looking for in overall
performance and the ability to go from "the analyst's laptop to full
production."
As an engineered language
(rather than something that evolved over time), Go benefits developers in
multiple ways, including garbage collection, native concurrency, and many other
native capabilities that reduce the need for developers to write code to handle
memory leaks or networked apps. Go also provides many other features that fit
well with microservices architectures and data science.
Go advantages
Some programming
languages were hacked together over time, whereas others were created
academically. Still others were designed in a different age of computing with
different problems, hardware, and needs. Go is an explicitly engineered
language intended to solve problems with existing languages and tools while
natively taking advantage of modern hardware architectures. It has been
designed not only with teams of developers in mind, but also long-term
maintainability.
At its core, Go is
pragmatic. In the real world of IT, complex, large-scale software is written by
large teams of developers. These developers typically have varying skill
levels, from juniors up to seniors. Go is easy to become functional with and
appropriate for junior developers to work on.
Also, having a language
that encourages readability and comprehension is extremely useful. The mixture
of duck typing (via interfaces) and convenience features such as ":="
for short variable declarations give Go the feel of a dynamically typed
language while retaining the positives of a strongly typed one.
Go's native garbage
collection removes the need for developers to do their own memory management,
which helps negate two common issues:
- First,
many programmers have come to expect that memory management will be done for
them.
- Second,
memory management requires different routines for different processing cores.
Manually attempting to account for each configuration can significantly
increase the risk of introducing memory leaks.
Go's native concurrency
is a boon for network applications that live and die on concurrency. From APIs
to web servers to web app frameworks, Go projects tend to focus on networking,
distributed functions, and/or services for which Go's goroutines and channels
are well suited.
Suited for data science
Extracting business value
from large datasets is quickly becoming a competitive advantage for companies
and a very active area in programming, encompassing specialties like artificial
intelligence, machine learning, and more. Go has multiple strengths in these
areas of data science, which is increasing its use and popularity.
· Superior
error handling and easier debugging are helping it gain popularity over Python
and R, the two most commonly used data science languages.
·
Data
scientists are typically not programmers. Go helps with both prototyping and
production, so it ends up being a more robust language for putting data science
solutions into production.
·
Performance
is fantastic, which is critical given the explosion in big data and the rise of
GPU databases. Go does not have to call in C/C++ based optimizations for
performance gains, but gives you the ability to do so.
Seeds of Go's expansion
Software delivery and
deployment have changed dramatically. Microservices architectures have become
key to unlocking application agility. Modern apps are designed to be
cloud-native and to take advantage of loosely coupled cloud services offered by
cloud platforms.
Go is an explicitly
engineered programming language, specifically designed with these new
requirements in mind. Written expressly for the cloud, Go has been growing in
popularity because of its mastery of concurrent operations and the beauty of
its construction.
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