Golang had its incredible jump in popularity since 2016! Why do developers love working with Go?
Let’s find the reasons why we love it too.
Recent studies show the popularity and adoption of Golang are expanding. In September 2016, Go was named as the programming language of the year by the TIOBE index. In 2017, it was in the 10the place which showed a significant increase in adoption. And in October 2018, Go was ranked as the 12th most popular programming language.

The Stack Overflow Survey which was conducted in January 2018, ranked Golang in the 5th position in the most loved languages list. According to the GitHub report in Q2 of 2018, Golang has grown almost 7% overall with a 1.5 change from the previous Quater. By Q4 of 2019, Golang has grown to an 8% overall increase.

A customer approached us to develop a web application for a critical product in advertisement retargeting space. He had a potential customer base and scope to handle 1+ million requests every day. With this huge user base, he wanted the application to be efficiently concurrent with high performance and better speed to all its users. He also preferred a code that could be easily understood by his developers back in his native land.

The technology stack discussion was long but Agira Team was convinced and proposed one of the best available languages of the open source world. We chose to do the project only in ‘Golang’ over other languages like Python, Ruby on Rails and PHP because we believed Golang met up with this customer’s expectations better than other programming languages. Trust us, Golang Programming is really fun & cool.

This blog is intended to capture the basic facts about GoLang, and serve as an introduction to the non-technical business people and the technical people who are exploring the GoLang features.

What makes “Golang” so popular?

The evolution of technology over the last couple of decades is tremendous and rapid! Everything from the size of computers to processor aspects, memory usage, software development languages, and frameworks is getting updated in a better and more efficient way! There hasn’t been a lot of choices for the base programming languages like C, C++ & Java.

But, Golang gave its entry in 2009. It was developed by Google. Golang aka Go is an open source programming language, It is compiled, statically typed and has concurrency. Golang has won over other programming languages by being really simple, concurrent between various codes and a great level of cloud compatibility.
Let’s take a look at the reasons why Golang is still popular!

Simple and clean code

The Golang code is really simple and reading it out will turn out to be surprisingly familiar. It has the simplicity of C, it gets rid of the concept of objects and any type or value can have a method. The number of lines of codes has been reduced by improved built-in libraries and functions. It was created to take over other codes of application development with a streamlined version coding excluding the parenthesis & type declarations.

Golang intentionally leaves out a lot of features to feature simplicity! It follows Pareto’s law in retaining 20% features and satisfying 80% of complex needs and functions. Fewer lines of codes make it easier to debug and few loops that could tie your code into knots. The expressions of C like assignments, pre or post increments were deliberately reduced and made as statements which highly contribute to the simplicity of the language.

C or C++ has high compilation time by importing files repeatedly without clear dependencies but Go has a simple and clean dependency model and the import option is very efficient thus making it easy to compile.

Concurrency

Golang is a boom to the huge scalability issue of Google with a huge number of machines and different platforms. Golang is highly concurrent and goes along with other native languages. The codes are broken into smaller components and are handled simultaneously taking into consideration the dependencies between various components.

“Goroutines” in Go enables concurrent function processing and the channels are used for components to communicate with one another and synchronize the execution. ‘Go’ also supports application development software like Android and IOS.

An application written in Golang can directly be launched into both Android and IOS. It is an active supporter of Android NDK (parts of the application are implemented in a native language such a C++/C )

Cloud compatibility

Go is one language that supports today’s internet essentials like high cluster computing, complex networks, cloud storage, and big data. Go is featured with a good network package, better garbage collection facility & solving the problem of unused variables, multi and cross-culture compilers.

GO also supports Unicode facility (Use of other languages as identifiers)

Companies Using Golang

Golang programming has grabbed the attention of big heads in the field of technology such as,

• Uber
• Google
• Twitch
• Daily motion
• Fabric
• SendGrid
• Medium

Google has started going in for GO and they think it is more efficient and simple. All Google download servers are being rewritten from C++ to Go to provide high performance with reduced network traffic.

There is a huge market for Golang programming with its 1.5 million potential customers who need a website or application which is vividly concurrent and efficient which Golang is good with.

Where is Golang used today?

Top 5 areas, Golang programming is useful in:

• Server-side and backend processing
• Big Data
• Web development
• Image processing
• Complex Web app engines/SOA
• Cryptography

Golang is awesome and using it spreads the wings of creativity with a high rate of efficiency and performance for the developers and users. Before concluding the blog… YES, the new product development in advertisement space has been a great success making it an excellent case study for an engine built completely in Golang & they are marching towards their goal successfully. We are excited to be part of the journey…. Go Golang!

What are your thoughts about the future of Golang? Please share in the comments below.
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