why use the go programming language?

I have been a go programmer before go 1.0 was released, I think that brings me back to beginning writing go code around 2011. as en exercise I wrote a simple daemon to handle some backend work where concurrency was key and have enjoyed developing it for quite some time. It replaced a python process where many actors needed to operate on a workqueue. This daemon is actually still in produciton today =P

In summary

work in progress!

This page will be filled out over time

Easy To Learn

It is hard to say how important it is to get this right. Having a langauge that is both powerful and easy to learn is extremely challenging.

The go language is easy to start with and quickly learn and get up to speed on.

Coming from a history of C, PHP, Ruby and Python, it only took a couple weeks before I had something that was production ready.

Compiled Language

compiler checks a lot of errors for me

One case which use to get me all the time is error handling code in dynamic languages. If you do not unit test every case, often a undefined variable would result in your error handling code explode.

The go language also has some unique features. Undefined and unused variables cause compiler errors.

Strictly typed

Similar to being a compiled language,

Large refactors in code often require changing arguments around or adding new ones. With a strictly typed language this is easy. If the compile works, you can be fairly confident that everything will run as designed.

Static linking

Being a statically linked package means you are deploying a single binary or binary + config file. The only thing most go binaries link to are libc for some OS level networking support. It is possible to compile without libc entirely if you choose. Finally, if you avoid cgo this means your binary will run anywhere given you have a matching architecture.

This is an amazing feature coming from python I love python but its biggest shortcoming is the confusion that arrises from the myraid of packaging systems.

Type system

Go has a interesting type system which removes the fundamentally flawed OOP features. OOP programmers often uses inheritenace when composition could be used instead.

composition means you combine objects together instead of searching a inheritence tree. I am not going into all the details here but here is the wikipedia article on composition

Language Grammer

a language spec that is well defined https://golang.org/ref/spec, short, and simple.

Without a well defined language specification, none of the tooling would be possible. It also makes it easy to develop tools which parse code into AST (Abstract syntax tree) and manipulate it. Ie, write code which modifies other code. This was not very practical in other langauges (IMHO). The go/ast and go/types packages lowered the barrier of entry to write quick tools for manipulating go source code.

Tooling

The amount of tooling really makes go a step above the rest

godoc and godoc.org

having the ability to easily see any 3rd party libraries documentation on godoc.org or with godoc locally is a far superior experience when trying to use someone elses library.

gofmt

This tool automatically formats source code in a pre-defined way.

The tool shuts down the bike shed discussions which naturally occur about code formatting. Most people (if not all) require gofmt to be executed on the source code being submitted to a project. This is also very useful to tie into your editor on save. Often you can paste a piece of code which does not match the indentation level, and watch it all fall into place.

I have spent a lot of time re-indenting code and this is no longer a step in go.

goimports

This tool automatically adds imports and removes unused imports in a source file

It is very useful to not worry about jumping to the top of the file and change imports every time you modify code.

godef

This tool is used in editors to jump to a types declartion.

Within vim one can type gd on any variable or type and the editor jumps to the file and location where that thing is defined. It is very useful for navigating unfamiliar and large source trees.

gocode

This tool provides a auto complete interface of methods and variables

integration with editors, like vim-go really tie the tools together for a IDE like developer experience from the terminal. Of course there is a lot of graphical editors too if that is your thing.

vim-go

Lots of amazing features provided by vim-go

  • Godef - typing gd in vim goes to the file defining the type or function that is under the cursor
  • Automatic imports - typing gi in vim adds missing imports and removes unused imports

Others?

I am sure I missed some tools that I use. What tools do you use that are not mentioned here?

Concurrency

Last but not least and quite possibly the most important feature of go is its concurrency primitives.

They are built directly into the language specification and first class citizens (they are not bolted on later).

goroutines are essentially coroutines but are executed across multiple real OS threads. The runtime scheduler handles everything for you so you can focus on writing logically blocking code. goroutines run in parallel, which makes it easy to maintain a mental model of what is happening in a concurrent program.

channels are the communication primitive and allow different goroutines to talk to each other. A channel can be buffered and unbuffered, which allows creation of some really useful patterns.

Useful Resources