Go Programming language – For beginners

What is Go programming language?

Go is an open source programming language developed by the tech giant “Google“. This language led to the creation of softwares in a very easy and efficient manner. Why? mainly because of its open source facility. The popularity of Go programming language is clearly visible as this language has made to the list of top 10 programming languages in the world. Want to know how? Well, there are quite a few reasons behind this.

The best part is we will be discussing each of them here. But first, let’s see what its definition has to offer?

Definition –Go language is a programming language initially developed at Google in the year 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is a statically-typed language having the syntax similar to that of C. This language is also capable of providing garbage collection, type safety, dynamic-typing capability, many advanced built-in types such as variable length arrays, key-value maps and much more.

 

Why Go programming language was created?

Go programming language

Go programming language was created with the aim of combining ease of programming by interpreted and dynamically typed language, and with the full efficiency of statistically typed language as well.

The developers of the “Go” wanted to create a language which can be flexible, concurrent, fast and also has some automatic garbage collection functionality.

And to our surprise, they did so.

This language is being used for making websites both static and dynamic, for writing applications which can be distributed and can do a hell lot of processing and much more.

Features of Go programming language

Go programming language

  1. Powerful standard Library- Go offers a powerful standard library which is distributed as packages. The standard libraries prove to be helpful while coding. With the help of standard libraries, we can make the use of relevant functions in our programs.
  2. Independent Platform- Just like Java, Go is a platform independent language which means it can be run on any operating system regardless of any hardware changes. For better understanding, we can say its portable as well.
  3. Testing- Go is also capable of providing testing support to the programmers. It offers unit testing features such as a simple mechanism to write the unit test, parallel with the code because of this we can understand our code coverage by our own tests. As simple as that.
  4. Automatic Garbage Collection- Go excels in giving a lot of control over memory allocation and has dramatically reduced latency in the most recent versions of the garbage collector.
  5. Static Typing- Go has a static type functionality for its programmers. Which means it’s not just working on compiling the code successfully but also responsible for type conversions and compatibility.

Applications of Go programming language

Though Go is a new programming language but it is widely used in some of the popular areas of IT (Information and technology).

  • Netflix – If you are into movies and shows then you must have heard about this website. The chances of your visit on this website are also very high at least once in life. And you will be surprised to know that the Go programming language is used in two of its server architectures.
  • DropBox – One of the popular file hosting services in the world dropbox is also powered by this language. It’s an American based company where the headquarters is situated in San Francisco, California. Dropbox offers services like cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software.
  • Openshift – Openshift is a cloud computing platform offered by red hat. Red hat is a public cloud application development and hosting service which runs on AWS. And here too everything is powered by Go programming language.

Resources and Links to Learn Go programming language

Similar to any other language there are tons and tons of resources available to learn Go as well. You can learn it offline by taking numerous classes in your city or you can just opt for an online course. The main advantage of online courses is that they offer free tutorials. This facilitates you to learn without paying anything. So here we are listing some of the best available online sources.

So this was all regarding the introduction of Go programming language. 

Stay Tuned for more.

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