Let’ s talk about Go (also known as Golang) and why I like it. Go is a small and interesting programming language. It is created with simplicity in mind. In this post, I will present a list of reasons why I think that Go is a good programming language.

Simple and concise syntax

The syntax is similar to that used in scripting languages. You don’t need to set variables types because they can be automatically inferred. Everything is written down explicitly and there is no operator overloading. Functions also can’t be overloaded, which makes finding ones that will be suitable for given argument types set easier.

You don’t need to initialize your variables with 0 or NULL. The compiler does it for you. No more mistakes that come from uninitialized variables. Declaration and initialization can be done in one step. Have a look at some examples of variables usage:

// declare a is int and has value of 0
var a int

// declare and initialize a (compiler will infer that a is int)
a := 0

var b string = "abc" // b is string and has value of "abc"
var b = "abc" // you can omit type
b := "abc" // you can omit var and use :=

c := 1 // declare and initialize c to be equal 1
c = 2  // reuse declaration of c and overwrite it with 2

Despite the fact that types are not written explicitly the compiler does check if they match. Let’s see it in a simple example: 

f := "test"
g := 1
g = f  // this line will cause compilation error

This is a very import feature of Go and is an advantage over languages that don’t check types during compile time. For example in Python types are checked during runtime. This may lead to situations where typos in variables or fields names are causing errors when a program is already running.

Go has few keywords and simple but powerful control structures so it is very easy to read, understand and explore other people’s code. Most Go projects have relatively flat file structure so you don’t need search for files hidden deeply in the directory tree.

Error handling is based on multiple return values. Language has some sort of try catch exceptions handling (panic, recover) but it is used only in rare situations. Typical check for errors looks like this:

f, err := os.Open("file.txt")
if err != nil {
    // handle error here, write info to log etc...
}

defer f.Close() // close file when surrounding function returns

// use f

Opposite to other modern programming languages Go, decides to stay with not so many programming concepts included. There are no classes and standard object oriented features. We have only structures, interfaces, and composition of them. Authors of Go are adding new features only after carefully thinking about positives and negatives of them. That is why we still don’t have generics in Go. Right now community can’t find a good way of their implementation. This is because the way must be coherent with rest of language. They don’t want to add random unthought generics implementation that will break language and add unnecessary complexity

This features make Go a language of short learning time and with ease to master. It is very accessible for both for experienced and fresh programmers.

Text editor oriented

Vim + 2 plugins are more than enough to effectively develop using Go. You don’t need any type of IDE which will load itself for five minutes. The set of tools that come with Go is designed to work with any kind of text editor that can call shell command as part of text processing. Go is a language for humans not for machines so most of the time you don’t need any special tools to write Go code. A good text editor will be enough, but if you want some additional features you can always use small plugins.

If you are Vim or NeoVim user (like me) I can recommend this two addons:

They are wrappers around standard Go commands. They will allow you to interact with Go toolset without leaving text editor.

One way of doing things

Go philosophy is convention over configuration. From syntax point of view we have only one type of loop - the for loop. But you can use it to achieve a lot of things:

//infinite loop
for {
}

// while loop
for i < n {
    i++
}

// standard for loop
for i := 0; i < n; i++ {

}

Fast compilation to machine code

Go compiles to native code really fast. You can feel like if you are working with scripting language where there is no compilation step. Go produces statically linked binaries. You can run them on your target machine without any additional dependencies. The obvious disadvantage of static compilation is that it produces big executables. I think it is not always problem today when you can have the 4TB disc at your stationary home computer, and even more in servers.

Excellent tooling

Go is created together with the set of official tools that help with development. You don’t need to choose and configure compiler. You don’t need to write any kind of additional scripts (Makefiles) to build your project or generate documentation. The most important and interesting tools are:

  • go build - this command analyzes your project and its dependencies and automatically compiles and links your program. It uses Go import statements from code to find out what needs to be built. Go build will always optimize your code so no additional flags are required. This tool gives you also easy cross compilation - you can compile executable for Mac on Linux without any problems. Individual files can be marked to be built in certain processor platforms or operating systems only. That way you can create optimal code for all platforms and achieve maximum portability.
  • go get - this tool downloads and installs libraries from GitHub or other repositories. Obtained files are placed in right directories and there are no problems with their usage or compilation.
  • go test - Go has built in testing framework. You just need to name your files like mylib_test.go and go test command will find your tests and spin them up. If you want to push your code speed to the absolute limits you can your build in benchmarking framework, where you can analyze CPU and memory usage. You can also find whether Go garbage collector is not working too much because you needlessly allocating memory.
  • godoc - Go has very human-friendly way of documentation code - you don’t need to use HTML or Restructuredtext. Just add comment line above object you want to write info about. After running godoc you will have beautiful and uniform documentation for your code in your web browser.
  • gorename - one of the nice tools for code refactoring (Guess what it does? - Obviously it is used for renaming variables, functions, types and other symbols in Go souce code)
  • gofmt - this tool formats your Go code to meet official standards. In Go, there are no more formatting wars because everybody just runs Go fmt on their code and it gets tidy up.

Concurrency

In Go concurrency is the first class citizen. There are special keywords that are built into language:

  • go - this one allows you to call function concurrent to actual instruction sequence.

    package main

import (
"fmt"
"sync"
)

var wg sync.WaitGroup

func test(i int) {
defer wg.Done()
fmt.Println(i)
}

func main() {
for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
    wg.Add(1)
    go test(i)
}
wg.Wait()
}

  • chan - in go you can communicate with other concurrent functions using channels. They are a preferred way of safe synchronizing access to shared data.

  • select - this keyword allows to use a group of channels at once

Brings in some interesting concepts

Some of them are:

  • Struct and interface embedding instead of inheritance.
  • Implicit interface implementation - you don’t need to declare that object implements an interface. If method name and parameters of object match ones in interface it means that you implemented it and your object compatible with an interface. This type of solving interface implementation problem allows you to add interfaces after implementation is done if you notice some kind of pattern in several types methods.
  • You can decide if type, function or field is exported out of package by naming it starting from upper or lower case letter. This reduces the need of using public and private keywords.
  • Defer - you saw this keyword before while reading this post. This command allows you to delay execution of some code to the moment of the surrounding function return.

Conclusion

I presented a list of reasons why I think that Go is a good language. Some of the readers may have other opinions and I respect them. Nevertheless, I hope that this article gives everybody good collection of stand out Go features and some of the readers will be intrested and may give Go a try.