For the past few days I was engaged in learning a new programming language called “Golang”, it’s a simple programming language for developing robust scalable software applications. I have explored many new things in the learning session. I would like to share my ideas and my learning experiences On Golang programming language.
Go Vs other programming languages?
Golang is a general purpose programming language which can compete with C and C++ languages, Go has a simple syntax with a minimum set of standard key words, the interesting thing with Go is, one can build complex applications, with simple programming model. We can put our effort in higher level abstract things. When we look the syntax of Golang, it eliminates lot of standard which are usual in C#, Java or C++. Go inherits many concepts from C language. To give few example, like how simple the language is, we don’t need to specify a semicolon (;) to terminate the line, no access modifiers in Golang. We can do it by declaring the function name starting with upper case or lower case. Most important things are, its compilation time is much faster than other languages, and even compiling very large projects is done in few minutes.
Generally, it eliminates some standard patterns from Programming Language Theory, the language designers have made it simpler to achieve more performance in critical real world application. The compiler directly converts from high level language to machine language, i.e. we don’t need any intermediate steps like JVM for Java, so the compiler quickly builds the application. Once the basic syntax in “Golang” is familiarized, we can develop application with its inbuilt standard packages without depending on any 3rd party Frameworks/tools.
Go for Fresher’s than experienced developers
I would say comparatively Golang will be more attractive to the fresh software engineers than the experienced developers, because when we start working with Golang its provide very simple syntax to concurrent programs. The learning curve is bit faster, but for the experience developers it will take some time to understand the core benefits of Golang programming language because for the past few years If someone developed their real world application using Microsoft technologies or any other technologies, it will not be so easy to quickly adapt this new language, it will take some time to understand the language features. Once core concepts are understood, one can build real world applications.
“Unlearn something to learn new things”
Go syntax is really different than other programming language, for example: We don’t need while loop but we can achieve the same thing via “for” loop, so by learning one looping statement we can do the same thing what we did for other programming languages, so it gives flexibility to build the application.
Concurrency with GO
I have learned concurrency mechanism in this session. It is one the core feature of GO, very useful and we can use the standard library packages rather than using any additional packages like a TPL and so on, with simple keyword we can execute multiple function concurrently using the keyword “go” calling a routine, so the go routines will be running independently and automatically, this will increase the performance as well, here the channel is playing the important roll to synchronize the go routines.
Go with Interfaces
Go provide language features like interface and inheritance. Similar concepts like in other languages, we achieve the same thing what we achieve in other programming languages like C#, which means I would not say Go programming language is perfect object oriented programming languages.
Comparing to other Object Oriented languages. Go is much simpler, for defining the interfaces and types and implementing those interfaces by concrete methods on respective struct, so the compiler will check who are all implementing those methods from the Interface, they can have an access to the interfaces. Its bit difficult to grasp or understand the things who came from traditional object oriented programming.
Go With Web
We can create web application using standard library package called “http” and some sub packages as well, here the http middle ware stuffs is interesting to manage the shared functionalities, i.e. log the application trigger or any other authentication mechanism in the real world application and so on. JWT is also important concept to understand the token based message exchanging mechanism of JSON data across the client and server. There are lot of built in packages available to extend the application and customize more.
Unit testing
This particular section was really interesting for writing unit test for our application, here we are simply using the “testing” shared library packages and start writing the unit testing, for the assertion we can use Omega packages, but we don’t want to mention the packages as well, there are lot of interesting points in the unit testing, because it provides some interesting features like “Benchmark” test, it is really useful to benchmark the flow and produce the average result across different scenario, another interesting things is we can run the unit tests in parallel and can skip some long running unit tests using a flag by command line.
Conclusion
Overall the session was really useful to understand the concept of new programming language and to understand why its differ from other languages and so on, for me the interesting features which attracted myself to GOLANG is its concurrency, channels, interfaces, inheritance, unit testing, packages, so overall Go is a language, easy to learn for fresher’s compare to the other experienced developers, because they can quickly understand and adopt. An experienced C# developer, will take some time to understand the changes, if someone is open minded and willing to unlearn some standard programming concepts he learned and practiced in Java or C#.
One needs to put some more effort and change the way he programs to speed up the learning process and use Go for building complex robust scalable solutions.
Thanks to Mr. Siju Varghese, Solution Architect who specializes in Go cloud and Docker.