Why Use the Go Language for Your Project?

Go or, as some say, Golang is a relatively young programming language designed by Google in 2007. Despite that, it uses a goofy gopher as a mascot, Go broke into the world of programming software as a dominant predator, and made such mastodons as Python and JavaScript wake up. Given this, more and more businesses pay attention to this language and choose Go as a core language for creating their web products. Let’s look at this Gopher closely and find out if it is the programming language of the new generation or just hype around the Google product.

Brief Historical Overview — How It is Was Going on

Start with defining the correct name of the language. In essence, many people think that it is called Golang because the website domain is golang.org. However, they are wrong, and language founders named their progeny as Go short for Gopher. Speaking of the founders, Robert “Rob” C. Pike, Robert Griesemer, and Kenneth Lane Thompson were those who stood at the head of the Go design and development. Looking at these names, there is nothing unusual that Go has become so successful.

Why It was Going

The reason why Google specialists thought about the launch of the personal programming language was a desire to enhance productivity in working with multicore processors, large codebase, and networked hardware. During the development, experts want to do two things at once — get rid of the weaknesses of other languages used at Google, and keep all of their fortes. Developers created Go based on all the criticism of С/C++. But at the same time, they planned to take all advantages from other languages.

1. From С/C++ it has to take its static typing and runtime efficiency 
2. Usability and readability of source code similar to Python and Javascript have. 
3. Show high performance in case of work with networking and multiprocessing machines.

According to Go founders, their programming language follows the simple philosophy which fits in one line: “One problem should have one solution.” Due to such an approach, Go is an intuitive and comprehensive language, demonstrating high performance of data processing.

Go Implementation 

In general, you can use Go for any purposes, because it’s an open-source language. Anybody can contribute to it and tune Go to fit personal needs; however, its natural habitat of Go is server-side programming, backend, and orchestrating complex networks and web development, especially when it comes to the creation of the distributed web application. Due to its concurrency features, handling multiple requests and simultaneous interaction with many users are processed faster and with less CPU overhead.

According to the results of the Go Developer Survey 2019, the TOP three areas where Go is used are web development, databases and networks.

Companies Successfully Used Go

Despite different opinions about Go’s characteristics and feasibility of its use, this programming language already gained attention from world-known enterprises. Among them include such giants as Google, BBC, Uber, Docker, Intel, Medium, Baidu, and Alibaba. It’s only a few examples of success using Go. Following this link, you will see a list of all Go users, which is updated regularly with the Go team. 

The chart shows how people from different industries are satisfied with using Go in their projects.

Go Advantages

Go is an open-source programming language that allows developing simple, reliable, and efficient software. Let’s see what enables this

Go compiler

1. The programming language can boast with its compiling speed. This is achieved owing to converting the programming code directly into machine-level commands, and does not need to be interpreted whenever the app is launched. For example, when you open a website page, JavaScript is interpreted over again.
2. It has a powerful error checking functionality, which can tell developers if their code will work or not before compilation. This feature allows developers to save time from searching for bugs hidden in the code mass.
3. The compiler can run programs on the machine with different operational systems, using simple commands. Due to this feature deploying code to the server turns into a piece of cake – all just you need is one executable file.

Scalability

Scalability was one of the requirements during the Go development. Concurrency was a headache that a new programming language has to relive, and it brilliantly deals with it. Go has specially designed features that easily handle concurrency; namely goroutines and channels.

• Goroutine is a noteworthy built-in function that can be executed concurrently with other functions. You can launch hundreds of thousands of concurrent goroutines on a device, Go smoothly run them.
• Channels, in turn, allow goroutines to interact with each other. Thus, the program can complete tasks in the best way possible.

Simplicity and Strong Security

Go is a comprehensible programming language. It’s easy to write and easy to read the code of other developers. Due to “one solution for one problem,” Go is also very friendly for newbies. A set of standard libraries contain all necessary, even a web server. Such simplicity leads to a strong level of security. Recall that we talk about statically typed language. Using Go, programmers can forget about all difficulties related to complicated and hard to identify errors that more dynamic languages usually have. Also, it has such cool features, including a garbage collector, which tracks how memory feeling working with your code. As a result, you get clean and robust code.

Cloud Services and Containerization

The programming language allows using all the features and capabilities that cloud service providers have, such as AWS S3, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, EC2, and others. To do this, connect the Golang SDK, taking it from the official source of the service provider. Moreover, you can also easily launch your Go application in Kubernetes using Docker containerization.

Where the Use of Go will be Optimal solution

Given Go’s features and characteristics, the language perfectly fits if you need to develop:

• Streaming systems
• API’s
• Serverless web services (AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions For Firebase)
• Notifications Services
• XML, JSON, CSV parsers
• Mail sending platforms
• Projects with microservice architecture

If you need to develop one of the solutions mentioned above, or doubt if Go fits your project, feel free to contact us. Our experts help you determine the best way to satisfy your needs, and provide this solution quickly and efficiently.

Our Expertise in Go Development

Case Study 1: Video processing platform

The client is a company that developed the first consumer 360 3D camera and the new dual-camera. One of the challenges became a platform for rendering 2D or 3D high-resolution media in the cloud. It’s necessary to use the most powerful GPU instances for such processes, but this power is costly.

We offer a solution based on creating an auto-scaling Go for two reasons:

Go is a cross-platform executable language 

The Rendering Service used in the project worked exclusively under Windows, and it was very convenient to compile Go binary for all existing platforms with a single command. There was no need to install a programming language runtime, or other related mechanisms for executing source code, such as the Java JVM.

Concurrency goroutines

This language feature provides both work with a large media volume, as well as processing and loading data into the S3 storage much faster than it does languages without the support of Concurrency and Parallelism.

Case Study 2: An Increased Performance for a Banking System

The client was one of the big banks. They come to us with requests to increase the performance of processing transactions. Their banking system was built on PHP(Symfony 4). Each transaction was processed one after another, and processing speed was 200 transactions in 30 minutes) which was meager output for a big establishment. 

To resolve their issue, our experts decided to create a small Go binary to process transactions concurrently. The binary was a manager of PHP processes(each PHP process processes one transaction). As the binary was written, the processing of 200 transactions reduced to 1 minute that increased systems performance by 30 times.

Case Study 3: Fast Extracting Information about persons and companies of a Banking System

It was the same client, and this time they needed help with extracting data from many XML-files that had information about persons and companies and stored them in place. A full pack of XML-files contained two millions of people and companies. According to their system built on PHP (Symfony 4), this process can take two weeks or even more. The client can’t wait so long and needed that this process will take no more than three days. Our developers have written code in Go that allows us to process all of XML-files in 2 days.

Case Study 4: Health Info Management and Medical Records Blockchain Platform 

The NIX team had a challenging task to create, and confidentially maintain, the health info about a patient when there are several independent participants in the process. We had to isolate multiple organizations from each other through channels; thus, organizations without access to the channel cannot see the information in it.

For writing smart contracts for Hyperledger Fabric, we chose Golang. Our choice fell on him because it is convenient and quick to write a chain code on it. Moreover, Fabric itself was developed by IBM in this language.

Case Study 5: Property Management Platform 

The NIX team created a property management platform, with both web and mobile apps, designed to handle all aspects of running a successful property business. The main idea is to easily configure the multi-modules platform, which is an all-in-one solution for definite property management needs in different domain segments: rental, flats, condominiums. 

We used Go to build a backend part because the main requirement was to provide a high load performance on the server. Go worked stably under high load, and it doesn’t require significant server maintenance costs.

What is waiting for Go in Future 

Go is already one of the most in-demand languages, and interest will only increase. Due to its simplicity and scalability, a lot of companies consider using it. Among these, you can see both yesterday’s startups and large enterprises like Google. However, despite its simplicity, search for a quilled Gopher team can be challenging. NIX has significant experience in coding in Go, starting to apply it since the language was launched. Contact us to find out how we can help you succeed with Go.