When released, Go brought a huge boost to the web development and software engineering community, and it has a number of advantages over other web programming languages such as Python and NodeJS. Recently I read that some people argue that Go popularity decreases. But is Go really dying?
What is Go?
Go is a general-purpose, concurrent, compiled programming language that supports a number of data structures and is statically-typed. So, it has almost all the benefits of a statically typed language. However, it also has some features from dynamic languages, like garbage collection and generic variables.
Why Go gained popularity?
One of the reasons for its popularity is that it was initially created by Google. Computer engineers group includes Ken Thompson, who is one of the creators of C language. After the initial release, Go became popular because of its ability to solve many modern programming problems and its strong open source community.
The primary reason for Go popularity is its amount of advantages over another languages.
Pros of Go
It was designed to be efficient, because it follows the principles of “fast” development. Golang programming language is compiled, so it is much faster than dynamically typed languages.
Another benefit of Golang is the speed of execution, which is crucial in high-traffic projects. This is the reason why big companies, such as PayPal, Meta Platforms, Netflix, Cloudflare, Twitter, Twitch, and many others are using Go as a part of their infrastructure.
Other than these, Golang also provides good software engineering practices. It is also easy to read.
Go language also has the following advantages:
- Automatic garbage collection. Despite Go is a compiled language, you don’t need to manually deal with memory like in C or C++, it is managed by garbage collector.
- Memory safety. As I mentioned above, computer memory is handled on the language side. Go has pointers, but not pointer arithmetic. This protects the program from bufferoverflow vulnerabilities.
- Type safety. Thanks to the static type system, most of the problems are caught during compilation.
- Efficiency. Go language not only produces fast executables, it also provides all the tools you need for rapid development.
- Extensive tooling. Out of the box,
gocommand has all the tools you may need during the development. - Easy package management.
- Another advantage of Golang is its easy learning curve, which is one of the most attractive things for new users. It is very easy for the average developer to use Go.
- Built-in concurrency. By taking advantage of goroutines and channels, one can create fast multithreaded application with high execution speed.
- Cross-platform. You can compile Go binaries for Linux, Windows, MacOS and BSD.
Also, Go language has friendly community and good documentation, accessible from pkg.go.dev or using go doc tool.
Is Golang still relevant?
Some developers argue that Go programming language is dead. In fact, Go is becoming even more popular in 2022. See the table from TIOBE index.
Source: TIOBE.
People’s interest in Go is growing rather than falling. As you can see, Go is more popular than Ruby, MATLAB and other languages. It means that it is possible to find a job as Go developer.
Conclusion: Will Go die soon?
The above-mentioned benefits of Go can help you have an idea of why it is one of the best programming languages. And it is popular in many areas:
- Web programming
- DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering
- Command-line application development
- High-performance cloud computing
- Scalable network applications
So, if you wonder if Go is dead in 2022, now you know that Golang is still popular and certainly will not die soon.